You know how this usually goes. The BLM runs an oil-and-gas sale, somebody writes the furious headline, and we all move on. June 16 was one of those days. But it also had something quieter that almost nobody covered.

That same day, across five counties in southern New Mexico (Doña Ana, Grant, Hidalgo, Luna, Sierra), the BLM took winning bids on 47 parcels of public land. About 152,000 acres. Not for oil. For heat. Eleven companies showed up, Ormat and Invenergy among them, and the geothermal leases brought in $16.5 million, split between the federal Treasury, the state, and the counties. A scary-sounding number, if you love wild country. So let’s walk through it: what geothermal is, what it does to a landscape, and how it stacks up. The 101.

First, what we’re even talking about

For most of my life, utility scale geothermal was the renewable everyone forgot. It only worked in a few geologically lucky spots, which is why the whole U.S. fleet still adds up to barely 4 gigawatts. You drill down, tap the Earth’s heat, spin a turbine. Simple. The catch was you had to find a place where nature had already parked hot water near the surface.

That’s what changed. Enhanced geothermal, or EGS, stopped waiting for the right rock and started making it. Drill miles into hot, dry stone, crack it open with the same horizontal drilling and fiber-optic gear the shale crews use, and you can engineer a reservoir where there wasn’t one. Fervo Energy’s Cape Station in Utah has punched wells past 15,000 feet into rock hotter than 500°F, some drilled in under three weeks. Its first phase should start feeding the grid later this year. Around the clock, no sun or wind required.

Where this actually happens

Here’s the part that should matter to anyone who cares about public land. Conventional geothermal goes where the heat is, and the heat is in the West. The U.S. runs about 3,900 megawatts today, the most of any country, across 99 plants. California has 53 of them, 72% of national capacity, anchored by The Geysers, the largest geothermal complex on Earth. Nevada is second, 32 plants out of the Great Basin. After that it falls off a cliff: four plants each in Oregon and Utah, two each in Hawaii and Alaska, one each in Idaho and New Mexico. California and Nevada together hold about 95%.

And here’s what ties it back to June 16: the federal government estimates that all but about 10% of America’s geothermal resource sits on federal land. The BLM has authority over roughly 245 million acres open to leasing and already manages more than 800 leases, generating close to 1,900 megawatts, about 40% of everything the country produces. Unlike solar or wind, which mostly get built on private ground, geothermal is overwhelmingly a public-lands story. The resource is under BLM desert, and that’s where the buildout goes. Which is exactly why a New Mexico lease sale is the whole ballgame. If we’re going to pull power out of public land, the deal has to be that it gets restored. Right?

Now the twist. That geographic lock is breaking. EGS and closed-loop make their own reservoir, so geothermal can go almost anywhere there’s hot rock a few miles down. The new contracts already show it: 110 megawatts committed in Texas, another 150 east of the Rockies. Texas treats the heat under your feet as a private property right, so that buildout lands on private and old-oilfield ground, not public wilderness. The DOE figures geothermal could hit 60 gigawatts by 2050, more than fifteen times today’s fleet. That’s the version worth rooting for: build the low-conflict megawatts on private and already-disturbed land first, and take the pressure off the wild public country.

The footprint everybody gets wrong

Here’s the number that trips people up. The 152,000 acres is the leased area, the legal block where companies hold the rights. It’s not what gets torn up. Almost none of it gets touched.

The disturbed footprint runs about 1 to 8 acres per megawatt, and it shrinks over time, since a 3-to-5-acre drilling pad gets reclaimed down to under 2 once the wells are in. Outfits like Fervo drill 4 to 10-plus wells sideways off one pad; a binary plant runs 5 to 15 acres; roads take about 3.6 acres per mile and drive most of the habitat fragmentation; fences take near-zero acreage but carry outsized ecological cost. A 30-megawatt plant lands around 40 to 150 acres of long-term disturbance, even where the lease covers tens of thousands. Build out a few hundred megawatts across the full block and you’re looking at maybe a couple thousand cleared acres, well under 2 to 3% of the lease, the lowest land-use intensity of any renewable, second only to nuclear.

But here’s the honest part: acreage hides things. Roads and fences fragment far more land than they cover. Peak disturbance during drilling is bigger than what’s left afterward. And we don’t know the layout for these parcels yet. The 152,000 acres is the ceiling on where development could go, not a prediction of what gets cleared.

Carbon and the air

This depends entirely on plant type, and the gap is huge. A binary or closed-loop plant is sealed, so operational emissions are essentially zero. Lifecycle, a binary plant runs 11 to 47 grams of CO₂ per kilowatt-hour. Natural gas is 469. Coal is over a thousand. Not a close call.

Flash and dry-steam plants are the asterisk. They vent CO₂ and hydrogen sulfide, and a few sites are genuinely dirty: Mt. Amiata in Italy and some Turkish fields can top 1,000 grams per kilowatt-hour, coal territory. For New Mexico, the clean move is obvious: build binary or closed-loop, and the air problem mostly disappears.

Water, in a desert that has none to spare

Out in the Chihuahuan Desert every gallon is spoken for. The volume is manageable: air-cooled binary plants consume under 200 gallons per megawatt-hour, in line with wind and solar, and Fervo reports about 14 over a well’s life. The real question in a dry region isn’t how much, it’s which water, and the answer is good. The modern operators run on brackish, undrinkable water, and federal analysis figures more than 90% of future EGS could run without ever touching fresh water. In a basin where geothermal competes with farms and towns for the aquifer, that’s the difference between a fight and a non-issue.

The part that can actually go wrong: earthquakes

The defining risk of EGS is induced seismicity: pump fluid into rock at pressure and you can wake up a fault. Done right, the tremors stay too small to feel. Fervo runs a “traffic-light” protocol, green below magnitude 2.0, that stops injection the second things climb.

Done wrong, it’s ugly. In 2017, an EGS project in Pohang, South Korea hit a fault nobody had mapped and triggered a magnitude-5.5 quake, the largest known EGS-induced event. It injured 135 people, displaced 1,800, damaged 57,000 structures, and ran roughly $123 million in repairs. The project was killed. Basel, Switzerland scrapped its project in 2006 after a magnitude-3.4 jolt. The lesson is consistent: map the faults first, monitor in real time, don’t drill on top of a critically stressed one. Southern New Mexico is seismically active, so screening these parcels matters. Would you want the company finding the fault after the quake?

The brine, the ground, and the wildlife

A few quieter impacts the acreage tally misses. The brine that surfaces can carry arsenic, boron, mercury, and hydrogen sulfide; you handle it by pumping nearly all of it back down, which also holds reservoir pressure. Pull fluid out without putting it back and the ground sinks, the way Wairakei in New Zealand dropped about 15 meters over 50 years, but full reinjection, standard now, largely prevents it.

The wildlife is where the desert specifics bite. These parcels sit in habitat for the endangered northern aplomado falcon, a grassland bird that likes exactly this country. And those fences: pronghorn show near-total avoidance above roughly 0.8 fence crossings per mile, and in Wyoming researchers found 146 sage-grouse carcasses and feather piles along a single 4.7-mile stretch of barbed wire near Farson. The fix is cheap and known, top wire under 42 inches, smooth bottom wire above 16, but only if the BLM requires it.

How it stacks up against everything else

Against everything else on the grid, geothermal is unusual: the smallest land footprint of any major source, emissions level with wind and solar, modest air-cooled water use, and 24/7 baseload reliability like nuclear, which solar and wind can’t match. Its drawbacks are its own, induced seismicity, brine, and subsidence, the first serious and the other two largely solved by reinjection. No other clean source carries that mix, and none deliver firm power on a few hundred acres.

The version that skips the worst of it

There’s a newer design worth knowing. Closed-loop geothermal circulates fluid through sealed pipe buried in the hot rock. No fracturing, so no induced earthquakes, no fluid lost to the formation, no brine to handle. Eavor delivered the first commercial grid power from a closed loop in Geretsried, Germany this past December. The trade-off is lower output per well, but for fragile ground it sidesteps almost every problem on this list. New Mexico already has one in the works: a 150-megawatt closed-loop project going up to power a Meta data center. When does that combination come along?

So what do you actually do with all this

Here’s what I keep coming back to. A lease sale doesn’t move a single shovelful of dirt. Those 152,000 acres are exactly as wild today as they were on June 15. The real decisions happen later, at the site-specific drilling stage, in the BLM’s environmental assessment for each project: water sourcing, seismic limits, falcon surveys, where the roads and fences go. So watch for it. When the reviews for these parcels open, push for the brackish water, the hard seismic cap, the falcon surveys, the wildlife-friendly fences, and the closed-loop design where the geology allows it. Public land put to work on clean heat, then left whole. That’s a trade worth getting right.

But here’s the real reason this one gets me. Geothermal doesn’t just add another clean megawatt to the pile. It goes after the fuel we’ve had the hardest time quitting: natural gas. Solar and wind have been eating coal’s lunch for a decade, but gas kept winning, because it’s always on and the grid needs always-on. Geothermal is the first clean source that does that exact job, the same round-the-clock firmness with no smokestack. Every megawatt of it is a gas plant that doesn’t get built, or one that runs less.

And gas is dirtier than its reputation. It’s mostly methane, which traps more than 80 times the heat of carbon dioxide over its first twenty years in the air, and it leaks at every step: the wellhead, the pipeline, the compressor station. Knock down the demand for new gas and you knock down the reason to drill the next field, lay the next line, lease the next stretch of public ground for it. Heat from rock we already own, instead of one more well pad on land we can’t get back.

My current take on this

Let me say the quiet part out loud. I’m not a purist, and I don’t trust purism on this stuff. The world doesn’t run on all-or-nothing, and the conservation that pretends otherwise usually loses. Every one of these calls is a trade. You weigh what you get against what you give up, you put the thing in the right place, and you aim for the least harm you can live with.

My ideal? Nothing new on public land. Especially, ecologically strong public land. Leave it be. But I’ve been around long enough to know that’s not always how it shakes out. The demand for power is real, the grid keeps growing, and somebody is going to build something somewhere. So the honest question is what gets built, and where. Given that, I’ll take a geothermal field that runs clean for decades over another gas play any day. Less oil and gas, more heat from rock. That’s a trade I can defend.

Thank you for reading! Wild places don’t come back. Conservation Current tracks the policies, projects, and decisions eating away at America’s public lands, and holds the energy industry accountable when it takes the easy path over the right one. I believe in clean energy and progress but it must be done ethically.

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Sources:

BLM, June 16

ThinkGeoEnergy, June 17

2025 U.S. Geothermal Market Report

U.S. Department of the Interior / BLM (federal land share, lease and acreage figures)

NREL/DOE geothermal land-use and lifecycle literature

NREL lifecycle review (2017)

DOE GeoVision and DOE 2050 projection; Project InnerSpace / New Mexico Tech (2025) Ellsworth et al. (2019) and the Korean government investigation on Pohang

BLM IM 2010-022 (Farson fence study).

On a March afternoon, a camera bolted to a tower out in Arizona’s Coconino National Forest caught something on the horizon. A little smudge. Could’ve been a cloud. Could’ve been dust.

It wasn’t. It was the first breath of what became the Diamond Fire. The software flagged it, a human looked and agreed, the firefighters got there fast, and the whole thing was out before it crossed seven acres.

We’re supposed to cheer. AI caught the fire. Crisis averted. And near homes, near families, the extremely hot fires, sure. A huge save.

But sit with it a beat longer than the press release wants you to. Notice what the AI is actually doing. It’s watching. A camera on a tower, on public land, looking out over a national forest. Just watching. Hold that picture, because by the end of this the machine won’t be watching the forest anymore. It’ll be standing on it. Drinking it.

First, though, a harder question creeps in.

Should we always put it out?

Fire isn’t always the enemy. We just decided it was.

Most of us were never taught this part. A huge chunk of this continent didn’t tolerate fire, it needed it. Low, cool fires clear out underbrush, recycle nutrients into the soil, crack open the canopy and let some light through. Some trees literally can’t reproduce without it: lodgepole pine, giant sequoia, their cones sealed shut until the heat pops them and drops the seeds. The longleaf pine savannas of the Southeast are some of the most biodiverse places on the continent, and the reason is they burned every couple of years. Indigenous peoples burned on purpose, deliberately, for thousands of years. Fire was a tool. Maintenance work.

Not a disaster.

Then we showed up with Smokey Bear and a century of “put it out, every time, fast.” And here’s the brutal part. That’s a huge piece of why we’ve got megafires now. All the brush and deadfall that used to burn off in cool little ground fires just piled up. Decade on decade. So when something finally rips through, it isn’t the gentle burn the forest spent ten thousand years adapting to. It’s a monster. Cooks the soil. Kills everything down to the seed bank.

We didn’t prevent fire. We saved it up.

So think about what “AI catches fires faster” actually means if we’re not careful. It means we built a machine to do the wrong thing more efficiently. Spot everything. Suppress everything. Automate the exact mistake that put us here.

The tech could be smart about this, in theory. The version worth building isn’t “see smoke, send trucks.” It’s the harder judgment call. Which fire do you let breathe, which one do you kill. Diamond Fire heading toward houses? Kill it. Obviously. A lightning strike out in the backcountry doing the thing that forest has done for ten thousand years and frankly needs us to leave alone? Maybe you let that one cook.

That’s the call that matters. It’s also not the call most of these systems are getting built to make. They’re built to suppress. Suppression is what we know how to sell.

(That’s what this piece started as. One fire, one camera. It grew into something bigger, and I’ll be straight with you, I’m still in the middle of it. What does AI actually cost to build, and what does that cost the public land and water we keep saying we love? I don’t have a tidy verdict. I’ve spent some time pulling threads and a strong hunch the math doesn’t add up. Pull on them with me.)

We keep trying to bolt a nervous system onto the wild

There’s this dream you hear at every conference now. I heard a version last week, in my own company’s “all hands.” AI’s going to save the whales off California: track them, track the ships, keep them from colliding. Beautiful. But nobody in the room said one word about what it costs to run that AI. We talked about the information we’d gain. Not the water, the power, the dirt it eats to do it.

It’s the same dream, just bigger. Wire up every national forest like a body. Cameras for eyes, microphones for ears, sensors in the soil, satellites overhead, all of it pouring into a “digital twin,” a living model of the whole place. So we can watch it. Measure it. Manage it. Know everything.

And I get it. Some of it even works. Out on the water, satellites plus AI started catching the fishing boats that kill their trackers and go dark, and in a lot of those “protected on paper only” places the illegal fishing dropped off a cliff once boats knew they could be seen. The ocean stopped being too big to watch. That’s real. Knowing where the poachers are helps you stop the poachers. Hold onto that one, it matters later.

But here’s what I keep snagging on. The forest already has eyes and ears. So does the ocean. A healthy ecosystem is the most sophisticated sensing-and-balancing machine that has ever existed, billions of years of trial and error, every creature reading every other one, predator and prey and fire and flood tuning each other in a loop no server farm is ever going to touch. The dawn chorus is the data. The fire is the management. We didn’t invent any of it. Mostly, we just got in its way.

So when somebody talks about wiring the wilderness up with our nervous system, I have to ask: to do what, exactly? The forest doesn’t need us to hear it. It needs us to quit interrupting.

Here’s the part that should make you a little furious

While we daydream about smarter ways to watch nature, the machine doing the watching is quietly eating it.

AI doesn’t live in a cloud. There is no cloud. There’s a building. A big, hot, thirsty building stuffed with computer chips and it sits somewhere real, drinks something real, burns something real. And more and more, that somewhere is public land, and that something is public water.

In 2025 the federal government opened four sites to private companies for AI data centers and the power plants to feed them: Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, the old Paducah uranium plant, Savannah River. The Energy Secretary called it (I’m not making this up) “the next Manhattan Project.” For chatbots. The pitch on the Paducah site brags it’s plumbed for up to 30 million gallons of water. A day. One site.

And here’s the thing nobody walks you through. How does a private company even end up on public land in the first place? Quietly, mostly. A lease here. A right-of-way grant there. A special-use permit from the Forest Service. The land doesn’t get sold so much as handed over the counter, a parcel at a time, by an agency that’s supposed to be holding it for you. And the one guardrail meant to slow this down, the environmental review, where somebody studies what the thing will do to the water and wildlife before the bulldozers roll. That’s the exact piece getting shredded. In New Mexico, the Bureau of Land Management used emergency powers to fast-track a natural-gas pipeline across public land to feed one of these, cutting a federal review from a year to fourteen days. Fourteen days. On your land. That’s not a loophole. That’s the door coming off the hinges.

Zoom out and the numbers stop feeling like numbers. Data centers worldwide are on track to more than double their electricity use by 2030, to roughly what the entire country of Japan burns in a year. In Utah, lawmakers kept coal plants alive that were supposed to shut down, just to feed this stuff. Burning more coal to run the machines we then use to fight climate-driven wildfires. And the water. One big data center can drink what 6,500 households use, every single day. Down in Texas, the projection is data centers drawing the equivalent of Lake Mead down sixteen feet in a year. And a lot of it’s going up in the desert Southwest, because the land’s cheap and the dry air helps cool the chips. So read that twice. We’re putting the thirstiest machines we’ve ever built in the places with the least water to spare.

This is encroachment. The exact opposite of protecting what’s left. In Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, the coalition fighting the Project Blue data center near Tucson has a three-word battle cry: “Not One Drop.” In Utah, a data center sited on a stream feeding the already-shrinking Great Salt Lake drew a record wall of protest, around 3,800 formal objections, so the developer simply withdrew its water-rights application and announced it would refile, wiping the slate clean and forcing every protester to start over and pay the fee again.

People are fighting. In rooms, in actual towns. By the close of 2025 the trackers counted something like 188 opposition groups across 40 states, a dozen-plus legislatures inching toward moratoriums, somewhere around $156 billion in projects blocked or delayed in barely a year. A huge chunk of that done by regular people taking a Tuesday night off and making it weird for the developer in the suit. And here’s the part that turns the stomach. A lot of these deals get cut behind NDAs, so the folks who live there can’t even pry loose how much water the thing will drink until the bulldozers are already rolling. Public land. Public water. And we can’t see the receipts. The word public was supposed to mean something.

Okay, so where does the water actually go?

I want to slow down here, because this one took me a while to get.

There’s a hunting/conservation podcast I listen to, and the guys spent a whole chunk of an episode circling the same question nobody could answer. They knew these things “use water.” But one guy kept pushing: use it how? You pull it in at 50 degrees to cool the machines. Does it come back out? Where does it go?

The coal-plant instinct.

They reached for the coal-plant model, and that’s a smart instinct. A coal or nuclear plant sucks a river through itself and spits it back out warm. That’s “once-through” cooling, and it’s a real problem: the hot water holds less oxygen, scrambles the signals fish use to spawn, cooks the bottom of the food chain right where the pipe dumps. Some data centers work that way, and where they do, that story applies.

Where it actually goes.

But the most water-hungry way these places dump heat, and one of the most common, is just evaporation. They run water over cooling towers and let a big slug boil off into the sky. And here’s what the guys never got to: that water mostly doesn’t come back at all. Somewhere between 70 and 85% of what an evaporative plant pulls in is simply gone, lifted into the air as vapor, not returning to that watershed until it falls as rain somewhere else entirely, maybe three states over. Google reported 78% of the water its data centers pulled was consumed that way in a single year. That’s not borrowing water. That’s spending it.

And the heat? Follow it. The whole reason evaporation cools anything is that turning water into vapor takes a crazy amount of energy, and that energy is the heat coming off the chips. So the heat doesn’t go into a river to make trouble downstream. It rides out of the building on the back of the water, straight up into the sky. You can’t cheat the physics: just about every watt you pour into a rack comes right back out as heat that has to go somewhere, and in an evaporative plant, “somewhere” is the clouds.

Doing it dry.

Can you do this without evaporating water? Sort of. The simplest version is air cooling, basically giant radiators and fans, no water boiled off. Cold-climate data centers get there easiest, for the same dumb reason your beer chills faster on the porch in January than in the fridge. When the outside air’s already cold, physics does most of the work for free.

Closed loop, and liquid cooling.

“Closed loop” gets thrown around like everybody knows it. Think of it kind of like the cooling system in your car: the same coolant goes around and around, soaks up heat off the hot parts, runs to a radiator that cools it back down, comes back, does it again. You don’t refill it. The liquid isn’t used up; it’s reused. Scale that up to a building full of scorching AI chips and you get the approach everybody’s racing toward, in three flavors.

1. Direct-to-chip sets little metal plates right on the hottest components, the CPUs and GPUs, with coolant running through them.

2. Immersion dunks the whole server in a tub of special fluid that won’t fry it.

3. Rear-door swaps the back of the rack for a radiator the servers’ own fans blow through. Microsoft even rolled out a “zero-water” design, a closed loop filled once at construction, that it says avoids more than 125 million liters of water a year per site.

All good advancements. Genuinely. And then the fine print.

One. Most of these only cool the hottest parts. Direct-to-chip grabs maybe 70 to 75% of a rack’s heat. But a rack’s also full of memory, drives, power supplies, that last quarter still comes off as plain hot air, and something has to remove it. Usually ordinary air-conditioning. So “liquid-cooled” almost never means only liquid-cooled.

Two, the big one. Here’s what “closed loop” hides. That sealed loop on the chip doesn’t get rid of the heat. It just carries it, over to a second system whose whole job is to throw the heat away. And the cheapest way to throw heat away is to evaporate water, same trick as sweating. So the building runs warm water over a big outdoor tower, lets a chunk boil off, and the heat goes up with the steam. That evaporated water is gone, replaced with fresh water, by the thousands of gallons a day. So both things are true at once: the loop touching the chip is sealed and reuses its water, and the building is still drinking fresh water hand over fist, one step downstream, at the tower, where you weren’t looking. Closed loop at the chip is not the same as closed loop at the building.

Three. You can build a tower that doesn’t evaporate anything, a “dry” cooler, like Microsoft’s. But that doesn’t make the cost vanish, it moves it. Dry cooling takes a lot more electricity, and the power plant making that extra electricity is itself one of the thirstiest things around. So you trade a water bill at the data center for a water bill at the power plant. Same water, different address.

So the water these things drink is a choice, usually the cheaper one, made on cheap hot land where some company decided the local aquifer could just eat the cost. The tech to not do that already exists. Whether it gets used comes down to who’s in the room asking the question.

Back to what the podcast suspected. That other 20 to 30% that does drain back out, the “blowdown”? That’s where the hunch about pollution earns a yes. You can’t cycle the same water through a tower forever, every lap leaves minerals behind and the water gets saltier and harder, so you bleed off the concentrated stuff, and by then it’s been dosed with anti-scaling chemicals, anti-corrosives, pH adjusters, and biocides to keep it from gunking up or growing Legionella in the warm tower. So what goes back to the creek comes out warmer, saltier, and full of chemicals. They were right to be suspicious.

And one more thing they circled and never landed: can’t you just pull from an aquifer, cool with it, put it back? Mostly no. First, you can’t reinject vapor, and vapor’s where most of it went. Second, even setups that return water don’t fix what the pumping does. Draw the groundwater down and you lower the water table. The one feeding the springs, the seeps, the wet meadows, the dry-season trickle that keeps a creek alive in August. We’ve seen this movie. Pump hard enough, long enough, and year-round streams go to gravel, the neighbor’s well goes dry, and in the worst cases the ground itself sinks. The water under your boots isn’t a different thing from the water in the trout stream. It’s the same water on a slower clock.

And the cruelest part is the timing.

These machines want the most cooling in August. Peak heat. The exact month rivers run lowest, aquifers run on fumes, and the alfalfa guy down the road is already fighting his neighbor for the same gallons. Not a polite sip. A spike. Right when there’s the least to spare. And that spring, that seep, that dry-season trickle? On a lot of this land that’s the watering hole every other animal in the valley walks back to when everything else has dried up.

The footprint you can’t see

The water and the slab are the parts a TV crew can stand in front of. The footprint is bigger. Once you list it out, the thing stops looking like a building and starts looking like a wound with edges that run for miles.

Start with sound. These places never sleep, and they hum. A low industrial drone off the cooling fans that carries for thousands of feet, plus diesel generators that hit 85 to 100 decibels when they fire. It’s the same physics for wildlife as for people. Animals call to find mates, hold territory, warn each other, keep a herd together. Park a permanent drone in the middle of that and you’ve jammed the frequency they’ve used for a hundred thousand years. Some just leave.

Then the lights. These places burn all night, and night light scrambles circadian rhythms, kills off melatonin, pulls migrating birds off course, and disrupt insects, the bottom of the whole food pyramid. Lose the dark, lose a piece of the system that ran on darkness.

Then the air. Those “backup” generators aren’t really backup anymore. As the grid gets squeezed, operators who swore the generators were for emergencies are angling to fire them up at peak demand so the data center can drop off the public grid. Northern Virginia alone has something like 9,000 backup diesel generators standing by. A state analysis found that at their permitted limits they’d throw off about 9,000 tons of nitrogen oxides a year, roughly half of everything Northern Virginia emits from all sources. In Memphis, xAI went straight to dozens of gas turbines in a city already named an asthma capital, and caught a Clean Air Act lawsuit for running them without permits. That exhaust isn’t an abstraction. It’s tied to heart disease, lung disease, and cancer, settling over whoever, and whatever, lives downwind.

Then the wires. A facility pulling as much power as a small city reaches. New high-voltage corridors get cut to feed it, and a corridor is a permanent clearing, a scar that opens the inside of a forest to invasive species and easier predation. Run that across a national forest and you’ve turned one contiguous piece of wild into two pieces with a wound down the middle. The building’s got a fence line. Its impact does not.

And that’s just the building. There’s a whole second water bill upstream nobody puts on the ledger: the chips get made in semiconductor fabs that can swallow ten million gallons of ultrapure water a day, with wastewater carrying heavy metals and acids; many of these places run on fracked gas with its own buried water cost; and the chips go obsolete in two or three years, so the whole filthy supply chain runs again and again at the speed of a software update. But most of that bill comes due in Arizona or Taiwan, not on the national forest down the road. So set it aside, and look at what’s happening to the land right here.

The honest bar

Here’s the question I can’t stop chewing on, the one a working biologist would ask before anybody panics. Is any of this population-level?

Because that’s the honest bar. Wind turbines kill birds, and the industry will tell you, correctly, it isn’t population-level. Cars kill raccoons by the thousands, and that isn’t either. By that same clear-eyed standard, one data center’s slab, the birds confused by its lights, the handful of critters it shoves out. No, that probably doesn’t tip a whole species over the edge. And I want to be as honest about that as I’d want the wind guys to be about their turbines. Same standard cuts both ways or it doesn’t cut at all.

But this is exactly where the framing pays off, because it points you at the thing that actually matters, and it’s not the slab. It’s the straw in the aquifer. The pull on the river. Multiplied across hundreds of these in one basin, all peaking in August at the same time. That has population-level written all over it. Pull the dry-season flow out from under a creek and you haven’t killed one animal. You’ve taken away the watering hole every other animal in the valley walks back to when everything else has dried up.

Habitat doesn’t need to get bulldozed to be lost. Sometimes all it has to do is go thirsty at the wrong time of year.

So what’s the actual answer here

Net positive or net negative? I don’t think that’s even the right question, because the two sides aren’t the same kind of thing.

Remember the poachers? I won’t pretend that away, because it’s the honest counterweight. Sometimes the watching does turn into something real. A tracked boat becomes a protected reef. Information becomes actual fish in actual water. So it’s not nothing. But look at the shape of the ledger. The upside is information, and information is slippery, it only helps if somebody acts on it, and it can get bought, buried, NDA’d, ignored. The downside is physical. A drained aquifer is just gone. One side of the scale is a maybe. The other is a hole in the ground. That’s why the math doesn’t add up. It never did.

Here’s my one rule. When somebody tells you AI is going to save nature, don’t nod along. Push back.

AI’s here. It’s not going anywhere. And it could do real good in a hundred other corners of life: medicine, materials science, grid efficiencies, climate models, genomics, and much more. I’m not anti-AI. Not anti-progress. I want AI to help human existence, and our environment. We need to invest in this properly. Spending more for truly closed loop and non evaporative practices, that are powered from cleaner energies.

The upside to AI is mostly information with the potential for physical value. It helps us see. See the dark boat. See the early smoke. See the next cure. The downside is always physical. A drained aquifer is just gone.

And under all of it is an assumption I want to drag into daylight: that nature is a problem to be monitored and managed. That more sensors plus more data plus a little more cleverness somehow stacks up to more nature on the other end.

It doesn’t.

The fire story proves it cold. We measured. We managed. We suppressed. And we walked ourselves straight into the biggest fires this continent has ever seen. The places doing best right now aren’t the ones we’ve instrumented to the eyeballs. They’re the ones we’ve left alone enough to keep doing their own work.

You want to know where I actually landed on this? In South Africa, of all places. A couple weeks out there with no service. No Wi-Fi. No TV. Just me and my own thoughts long enough that I got bored enough to actually run them down to the end.

And the line I scratched into a notebook was this. As the noise goes down, the signal comes clear.

That’s the whole essay, honestly.

Because nature handles nature. Always has. It’s better at this than we are by a country mile. The forest knows when to burn. The ocean knows how to come back. Our job was never to bolt a nervous system onto it. Our job is smaller, and harder. Protect what’s still here. Don’t let things creep onto it. And then, mostly… step back.

So here’s the doable thing, the one within reach for someone like you, or me. Find out what’s getting built near the wild places you love. The trackers are out there. The county agendas are public record. Show up. Ask the boring questions right out loud, in front of everybody. How much water. How much power. Where does the discharge go, and how hot when it gets there. Whose aquifer. Who pays. Who profits.

That question, asked in public, on the record, is the single sharpest tool any of us has. And roughly $156 billion in stalled projects pretty much closes the case on whether it works.

Because the forest doesn’t need us to listen in. It’s been talking to itself, beautifully, for a long time before any of us got here.

It just needs us to quit building things on top of it.

I’ll leave you with a question. When there’s a drought somewhere in the United States, who gets the water… the people, or the billion-dollar AI company?

Thank you for reading! Wild places don’t come back. Conservation Current tracks the policies, projects, and decisions eating away at America’s public lands, and holds the energy industry accountable when it takes the easy path over the right one. I believe in clean energy and progress but it must be done ethically.

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Sources

Fire and detection

- “States across the wildfire-prone Western US are using AI for early detection,” KPBS / Associated Press, May 2026.

- “Wildfire Management: Technologies for Forecasting, Detection, Mitigation, and Response,” U.S. Government Accountability Office, June 2025.

AI, satellites, and illegal fishing

- “Satellite imagery detects illegal fishing activity, shows strict protections work,” Phys.org, July 2025 (covering the study in *Science*).

- “‘The ocean is no longer too big to watch,’” Space.com, July 2025.

**Where the cooling water goes (evaporation, discharge, closed-loop)**

- “Data Centers and Water Consumption,” Environmental and Energy Study Institute — ~80% of withdrawn water evaporates; consumption-vs-withdrawal; the three-part footprint including chip manufacturing.

- “Myths vs. Reality: Data Centers and Water Usage,” Florida Water and Pollution Control Operators Association — 70–80% lost to evaporation, 20–30% returned as warm “blowdown.”

- “Data Center Water Use,” MOST Policy Initiative, April 2026 — Google fleet 78% consumed; salinity/temperature in discharge lowering oxygen; *Legionella* risk.

- “Understanding water use at Microsoft datacenters,” Microsoft, March 2026 — evaporative cooling above 85°F; zero-water direct-to-chip closed-loop.

- “Cooling Without the Drain,” Vantage Data Centers, April 2026 — sealed-loop cooling and treatment additives.

Groundwater, baseflow, and drawdown

- “Ground-Water Depletion Across the Nation,” U.S. Geological Survey — reduced stream baseflow; land subsidence; saltwater intrusion.

- “Rural Texas casting skeptical eye on data center openings,” Texas Tribune, October 2025 — Ogallala Aquifer concerns.

- “Data Centers and Their Implications for Rural Communities,” Oklahoma Farm Report, April 2026 — Texas rule of capture; pumping without compensating neighbors.

Noise, light, diesel, and air

- “Communities Are Raising Noise Pollution Concerns About Data Centers,” EESI, March 2026.

- “Understanding the impact of data center noise pollution,” TechTarget — generators at 85–100 dBA; noise disrupting wildlife.

- “The Dangers of Data Centers,” Environmental Health Project, February 2026 — all-night lighting and circadian disruption.

- “Data Centers,” Nature Forward, February 2026 — ~4,000 diesel generators in Northern Virginia; transmission-line impacts.

- “State regulators weigh expanded use of data centers’ diesel backup generators,” VPM, December 2025 — worst-case 9,000 tons of nitrogen oxides.

- “From Energy Use to Air Quality,” World Resources Institute — xAI’s Memphis gas turbines and the Clean Air Act challenge.

Upstream supply chain and e-waste

- “Semiconductor manufacturing and big tech’s water challenge,” World Economic Forum — a fab using ~10 million gallons of ultrapure water/day; heavy-metal wastewater.

- “AI Hardware Environmental Impact,” AI Energy Calculator, September 2025 — AI hardware obsolete in 2–3 years vs. 5–7 for general servers.

- “Data Centers and the Water Crisis,” Science and Environmental Health Network, August 2025 — the often-uncounted water cost of fracked gas.

Federal land, scale, and pushback

- “DOE Announces Site Selection for AI Data Center and Energy Infrastructure Development on Federal Lands,” U.S. Department of Energy, July 2025.

- “Energy and AI” (Executive Summary), International Energy Agency, 2025 — global data-center electricity roughly doubling by 2030.

- “Data Drain: The Land and Water Impacts of the AI Boom,” Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, February 2026 — Texas water use and the Lake Mead comparison.

- “A massive AI data center transforms rural Utah into a national flashpoint,” Peoples Dispatch, May 2026.

- “Opposition to AI data centers,” Wikipedia — ~$156 billion in projects delayed or canceled in 2025; state moratoriums.

Watch any cable news segment about energy prices.

Watch the B-roll.

A reporter says “energy prices are surging.” Cut to a gas pump. Cut to an electricity bill. Cut to a flare stack in West Texas.

Three different markets. Three different price drivers. One word.

This is the whole game.

When a politician says “energy,” they almost always mean one of three things. They almost never tell you which.

Crude oil. Set by Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), geopolitics, and global demand. The base ingredient. Refinery margins, taxes, and distribution stack on top to make the price you pay at the pump. It’s a fossil fuel.

Natural gas. Heats your house. Cooks your food. And (this part matters) generates a huge chunk of your electricity. Also a fossil fuel. Cleaner then coal and crude oil when burned.

Wholesale electricity. What you actually buy on your monthly utility bill. Made from a mix of fuels. Delivered through a regulated stack of wires and policy charges.

Oil can spike while electricity is flat. Gas can crash while gasoline stays high. Sometimes they may all move in tandem. Mostly they don’t move together.

Next time a politician says “energy prices are up” ask which one.

They may not know either.

(One more layer. Most of the world calls it petrol. Americans call it gas. Confusing, because gasoline is a liquid and natural gas is a gas. I’ll call it petrol.)

Quick case study. California. Highest petrol prices in the country.

When I moved here I thought it was just taxes.

It is not just taxes.

Roughly, the price of a gallon in California breaks down like this: crude oil ~35–45% (currently elevated thanks to the Iran war), refining ~15–20%, state and federal excise taxes about 80 cents combined, climate programs (Cap and Trade + Low Carbon Fuel Standard) another 60–90 cents, plus distribution and retail margin.

The refining premium is the part nobody talks about. California makes its own boutique blend, technically called California Reformulated Gasoline, Phase 3 (CaRFG3), the cleanest gasoline in the world. Out-of-state refineries won’t bother making it unless the premium is huge. So when a California refinery goes offline, and two are closing in the next year, there is no quick substitute.

81% of the petrol burned in California in 2025 was refined in-state. That number used to be over 90%. The state is closing refineries faster than demand is falling.

Did the blend work? Yes. California Air Resources Board’s 2003 assessment found the emissions benefits were equivalent to removing 3.5 million vehicles from California’s roads. It cut carcinogenic toxic air contaminants by more than a third. It is a big part of why you can see the mountains from downtown LA on most days.

The Gulf Coast pipeline network that feeds the rest of the country with refined product doesn’t cross the Rockies. The whole West Coast has to fend for itself. (PADD 5 - Petroleum Administration for Defense District 5 (the West Coast region: California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii) in U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) -speak.

Now here is the part nobody explains.

Your electricity bill is not one thing. It is four things bundled into one number.

Generation. The actual cost of making the electrons. 40–60% of the bill. The part that tracks fuel prices.

Transmission. Moving high-voltage power across the country on those big lattice towers. 5–15%. Regulated.

Distribution. The local poles. The wires on your street. Sometimes called telephone poles. The transformer the squirrel keeps blowing up. 25–35%. Also regulated.

Taxes, fees, and policy charges. State surcharges. Renewable mandates. Energy efficiency programs. 5–20%.

When your bill goes up, the politician on TV will pick whichever one is convenient to blame.

Here is the trick most people miss.

Natural gas is the marginal fuel in most US and European electricity grids. Meaning, even when only a fraction of your electricity actually comes from gas, the price of gas often sets the wholesale price of *all* electricity.

This is why Europe’s electricity bills exploded after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Gas spiked. Gas set the price. The wind farms got paid the gas price too.

Rage about wind and solar all you want. The grid was still running on the gas price.

There is also energy prices you don’t think about as energy.

Heating oil - basically the same product as diesel.

Jet fuel - in every plane ticket.

Bunker fuel - fuels maritime vessels. Price included in every imported thing you own.

Propane - the grill, the backup generator. Each one its own market. None of them what the politician means.

And the sneaky one - the energy cost of everything you buy is baked into the price.

Aluminum is essentially frozen electricity. 13–15 kilowatt hours (kWh) per kilogram. The reason aluminum smelters are next to cheap hydro.

Synthetic fertilizer is essentially frozen natural gas. The Haber-Bosch process turns gas into ammonia. When gas spikes, urea spikes. When urea spikes, food spikes.

Your grocery price is not just food.

It is natural gas with extra steps.

So here is the homework.

Next time someone in a suit says “energy prices are up” ask the question they don’t want you to ask.

Which one?

Crude oil is mostly OPEC and geopolitics. The president has limited levers. (But aometimes they really fuck it up.)

Natural gas is weather, pipelines, exports, and storage.

Electricity is a regulated stack. Most of which was set by your state utility commission, not the White House.

Three different markets. Three different stories. Three different sets of people responsible.

One word.

That is not laziness.

That is the whole point.

Thank you for reading! Wild places don’t come back. Conservation Current tracks the policies, projects, and decisions eating away at America’s public lands, and holds the energy industry accountable when it takes the easy path over the right one. I believe in a cleaner energy future, one that keeps off public land.

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I write this, build this, and fund this myself. If you find any value in this, a coffee goes a long way.

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Check out The Conservation Current Public Land Policy Tracker surfaces the five most impactful open comment periods and regulatory actions on federal public lands. Ranked by scale, irreversibility, and deadline urgency. Updated weekly. Always verify deadlines at regulations.gov before submitting.

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You’ve heard the press-release version. Farmers double their income, crops grow better under panels, water use drops, pollinators return, America solves the land-use conflict between agriculture and clean energy in one elegant move.

Parts of that are true. Most of it isn’t, or isn’t yet, or only is in places nobody’s actually building.

The peer-reviewed work from the last two years has at least moved the conversation somewhere useful. Agrivoltaics isn’t a vibe anymore. It’s a proposition that works in some places, for some crops, under some conditions, and doesn’t work in others. That’s what I want to lay out.

What are we actually talking about.

Definitions first. Agrivoltaics means solar panels and farming on the same land at the same time. In the U.S., the dominant form by acreage is sheep grazing under utility-scale arrays, about 113,000 sheep on 129,000 acres across more than 500 sites, per the 2024 Solar Grazing Census. Sheep sites are huge, so they swamp the other forms of agrivoltaics in the totals. The harder, more interesting version are row crops grown under or between elevated panels. That is where most of the recent science is. And where the trouble is.

Start with land and water.

The industry uses something called the Land Equivalent Ratio. The idea is simple: if you’d need 1.5 separate acres of solar and farmland to match what one shared acre produces, the LER is 1.5. Higher means more efficient use of land. Real-world agrivoltaic systems in peer-reviewed studies land between 1.2 and 1.8. That’s a real number. It’s good.

But LER doesn’t pay the bills. In one case, a Belgian pear orchard yielding 15% fewer pears while generating roughly 240 megawatt-hours per acre per year uses land 44% more efficiently than separating the two, and still loses money. Semi-transparent panels on elevated supports cost roughly twice per watt what utility-scale solar does, generate 60% as much electricity, and the 15% fruit shortfall costs 6,000 euros per hectare on top. Producing electricity at 200 euros per megawatt-hour into a market that pays 60–100 doesn't pencil out, no matter how efficiently you're using the land.

Water is where the case gets strongest, especially in the American West. A 2025 systematic review of 33 studies found agrivoltaic systems cut irrigation needs by 20–47%. The mechanism isn’t mysterious: panels shade the soil, slow evaporation, drop air and ground temperatures by 1.8–7.2°F. Moisture stays in the ground longer. Less watering.

A 2025 University of Arizona trial cut irrigation 50% under panels. Anasazi beans actually outperformed fully irrigated controls in the open field by 14%. Tomatoes held steady. Basil dropped 21%, rough, but better than the 39% it lost in full sun under the same water cut. Panels don’t erase drought stress. They take the edge off. In the Southwest, where water is existential, that’s the whole game.

Now the uncomfortable part.

A March 2026 PNAS study modeled agrivoltaics across the Midwest using fifteen years of climate data. Results split sharply along one variable: aridity. In drier western areas (Nebraska, Kansas) soybean yields rose 6%. In the humid eastern Corn Belt, (Illinois, Indiana, Ohio) soybean yields fell 16%, and modeled corn losses ran as high as 24%.

The reason is obvious once you see it. In hot dry climates the crop is being cooked, and shade helps. In cool, cloudy, or humid climates sunlight is already the limiting factor. Take more away and yields fall. There’s no engineering around that.

Corn is the worst case. One of the most light-hungry crops in agriculture. Even at Purdue, where researchers ran multi-year trials with custom algorithms tilting panels away from the plants during critical growth windows, the average yield reduction was about 7.7%. That’s the best engineered result. Most commercial setups do worse.

Two problems in this space deserve more attention than they get. First: do your panels match your tractor. A 2026 peer-reviewed analysis found that when panel spacing doesn’t line up with the working width of farm equipment, field efficiency drops to 45%. Makes sense. Buffer zones eat 30% of usable land in some designs. Second: soil compaction. A German field study estimated 5-6% yield losses across a site purely from vehicle traffic during installation. That’s comparable to the shading penalty. You’ll basically never see it in industry materials.

The economics are blunt. Solar carries the case. In essentially every financial analysis from 2024 through 2026, electricity revenue dwarfs crop revenue. Agrivoltaics works when it’s designed as a solar project that keeps farming alive, not a farm with panels bolted on. A 2025 Cornell study modeled the best use of land across seven crops and found pure solar won every matchup except cabbage. That tells you where the money is.

Sheep grazing, the dominant U.S. form of agrivoltaics, is the cleanest economic story. A 2025 model found ROIs of 16–43% and graziers earning around $194 per acre per year in vegetation management fees. It works because it solves a real problem for solar developers: cutting vegetation under panels is expensive. Sheep do it for free and pay you to do it.

Crop-based systems without subsidies are harder. You need high electricity prices, high-value crops, or water savings you can actually monetize. The IRA’s stacked credits, up to 50% of capital costs for qualifying utility-scale projects in eligible rural areas, move the needle.

Here’s the finding that bothered me most. A 2024 Penn State qualitative study interviewed farmers and solar workers in Pennsylvania and found that nobody, in any case observed, had negotiated agrivoltaic-specific terms into their solar lease. Standard land leases. No requirements for elevated panels. No protections for continued farming. No yield guarantees. The dual-use story was in the IRA pitch. It was not in the contract.

The environmental picture is cleaner. A five-year study at two Minnesota solar sites, in Environmental Research Letters, found native bee abundance up 20-fold, total insects tripled, flowering plant species richness up 7-fold. Pollinator activity rose on adjacent soybean fields too, the benefit spills past the fence.

Soil carbon depends on the system. A 2025 analysis found tracking systems built up soil organic carbon while fixed-tilt systems in dry environments actually lost 0.46 kg per square meter. The blanket “solar is good for soil carbon” claim doesn’t hold.

A 2024 life-cycle assessment found well-designed agrivoltaic configurations have 15–55% lower overall environmental impact than solar-only development, mostly because you don’t have to clear separate land. They also use more steel and structural material than standard ground-mount, which carries its own upfront carbon cost. Both things are true.

So where does this actually work in the U.S.?

The Southwest and California’s Central Valley are the strongest fit. Sun, water stress, heat-sensitive crops, irrigation pressure, all the advantages stack in the same place.

The western edge of the Corn Belt, Nebraska, Kansas, eastern Colorado, is the best near-term row-crop opportunity. Soybeans like partial shade in dry conditions. Irradiance is high. The Ogallala is in trouble. Anything that cuts irrigation pays back.

The Northeast has the highest electricity prices in the country and the most generous state programs. Specialty crops, not commodity grains.

The humid eastern Corn Belt is the worst fit for commodity crops. 24% corn losses in peer-reviewed modeling are not the kind of problem better engineering fixes when sunlight is the constraint.

Agrivoltaics is not a scam. It is also not a silver bullet. It’s a land-use tool that fits some places and not others. It works when the land is water-stressed, the crop tolerates shade, the system was designed with farming in mind from day one, and the contract actually protects the farmer. It struggles when the crop is corn in a humid climate, when the panels were an afterthought, when the deal is a standard solar lease with some agricultural language stapled on.

The question has shifted. It’s not “does agrivoltaics work” anymore. It’s where, with what crop, in what configuration, under what policy. Those questions don’t fit on a press release.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Let’s keep studying and hacking away at this solution.

Pursuing this, keeps solar off pristine desert soil, prairie land, and other public lands ecosystems. It should be pursued and further studied.

Thank you for reading! Wild places don’t come back. Conservation Current tracks the policies, projects, and decisions eating away at America’s public lands, and holds the energy industry accountable when it takes the easy path over the right one.

Subscribe now

I write this, build this, and fund this myself. If you find any value in this, a coffee goes a long way.

Buy me a Coffee

Check out The Conservation Current Public Land Policy Tracker surfaces the five most impactful open comment periods and regulatory actions on federal public lands. Ranked by scale, irreversibility, and deadline urgency. Updated weekly. Always verify deadlines at regulations.gov before submitting.

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Sources:

Solar grazing scale (113,000 sheep / 129,000 acres) https://solargrazing.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/ASGA-CensusReport2024.pdf

Belgian pear orchard (15% yield reduction) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13593-025-01019-0

Systematic review of 33 studies (20–47% irrigation reduction, 1–4°C cooling) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364032125006033

University of Arizona crop trial (Anasazi beans, tomatoes, basil under 50% irrigation cut) https://www.nature.com/articles/s44264-025-00073-1

Central Valley solar / water savings for ~27 million people https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-025-01546-4

Midwest agrivoltaics modeling (24% corn loss, 16% soybean loss, 6% gain in west) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2514380123

Purdue corn study (7.7% average yield reduction) https://www.nature.com/articles/s44264-026-00141-0

Companion paper: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-sustainability/fulltext/S2949-7906(24)00234-9

Farm equipment compatibility (field efficiency drops to 45%, 30% buffer-zone loss) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032125013346

German soil compaction during installation (5–6% yield loss) https://www.tib-op.org/ojs/index.php/agripv/article/view/2852

Cornell land-allocation optimization (cabbage as the only exception) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306261925001667

Sheep grazing economics (16–43% ROI, vegetation-management fees) https://news.westernu.ca/2025/01/solar-sheep/

Penn State qualitative interviews (no agrivoltaic-specific terms in observed leases) https://pure.psu.edu/en/publications/just-energy-imaginaries-examining-realities-of-solar-development-/

Minnesota biodiversity (native bees 20-fold, insects tripled) https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ad0f72

Soil organic carbon (tracking vs fixed-tilt, 0.46 kg/m² loss) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301479725019139

Life-cycle assessment (15–55% lower environmental impact than PV-only) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969723079044

I go up there to run. That’s the intention, anyway.

The trail along the ridge alternates between wide open grassland, and tight redwood canopy where the light goes green and the temperature drops and everything gets quiet fast. You move back and forth between those two worlds. It keeps you honest.

I stopped mid-run a few weeks ago. Not for anything dramatic. Just moss. The bark of a redwood covered in it, each frond curled into a tight spiral. Hundreds of them. I took a picture. I got close. Closer than you do when you're trying to keep a pace. Stood there for a good five minutes.

At the base of the tree sat a banana slug, easily six inches long, moving at a very different pace. The tree had been there for centuries. Neither of them needed me to show up and notice them.

I noticed them anyway. I think I was trained to.

I grew up in Indiana. No redwoods. No banana slugs. But we had trees. At least a few trees. A strip of “woods”, we called it, maybe 100 feet deep. Skinny enough, that in winter you could see right though to the other neighborhood. But enough to get lost in summer. It ran along the back of the whole neighborhood block. Technically owned by the neighbors whose yards touched it. In practice, nobody treated it that way. The kids just roamed. In and out of everyone’s yard, through the whole stretch. Nobody asked permission. (Now that I think about it, I bet our parents did.) It was just understood.

We built forts back there. Played games with no rules we could explain. Spent whole afternoons with nothing to show for it. At the time it felt like goofing off. Looking back it was something else. Learning how to pay attention to a place. How to be inside something without needing to control it.

That’s still what the ridge gives me.

I don’t think its an escape. More of a recalibration. I show up carrying whatever I’ve been carrying and the trail absorbs it without comment. The fog comes in off the coast like clockwork. The vultures read the thermals. The banana slugs do whatever they do. The moss keeps curling on the bark whether anyone stops to look at it or not.

I come up here to remember that the story was already going before I got here.

It’ll keep going after I leave.

But I also think about those kids on the block. The ones who had a strip of trees and a few unstructured hours and nothing else. That was enough. It didn’t have to be a redwood forest or a ridge above the Pacific. It just had to be outside. It just had to be real. A creek, a vacant lot, a neighbor’s backyard. Anything that operates by different rules than the ones indoors. Kids don’t need the perfect wilderness experience. They just need a place where they can slow down, pay attention, and figure out that the world is bigger and quieter and more interesting than whatever is happening inside.

That instinct, once it takes root, doesn’t go away. It grows. A backyard becomes a trail. A trail becomes a ridge. A ridge becomes something you can’t imagine not having. And once you’ve felt that, once a place has stopped you mid-run and made you stand still in front of a tree for five minutes, you start to understand why it’s worth protecting.

That’s what conservation is really building. Not just wild places. The people who will care about them.

So, give them the trees. Any trees.

Thank you for reading! Wild places don’t come back. Conservation Current tracks the policies, projects, and decisions eating away at America’s public lands, and holds the energy industry accountable when it takes the easy path over the right one. I believe in cleaner energy but only if it’s in the right place.

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Buy me a Coffee

Check out The Conservation Current Public Land Policy Tracker surfaces the five most impactful open comment periods and regulatory actions on federal public lands. Ranked by scale, irreversibility, and deadline urgency. Updated weekly.

Please check it out.

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"The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value."

Theodore Roosevelt

This Week’s Take

This week's stories share a single uncomfortable truth: the public lands system is being quietly restructured to serve extraction over the people who use and fund it, and most of it is happening below the radar. Research stations that inform how we manage 193 million acres are closing. Mining companies are being handed a no-notice back door into national forests. A premier trail in Theodore Roosevelt's own backyard is being offered up for oil and gas drilling. And the hunters and anglers who generate more than $1.5 billion annually for conservation are being stripped of the access funding that keeps them in the field, and in the fight. The one piece of good news is a coalition of 60-plus organizations proving that housing advocates and wilderness groups can find common ground, which is exactly the kind of coalition these lands are going to need.

1. Oil and Gas Leases Are Coming for One of America’s Premier Trails and the Park Named for Its Greatest Champion | April-May 2026

The Bureau of Land Management has started the process of selling lease rights to 23 oil and gas parcels in the vicinity of the Maah Daah Hey Trail, nine of which are right on top of it or very close. The trail is a 144-mile singletrack route for hikers, mountain bikers, and horseback riders that winds through the Badlands of western North Dakota, connecting all three units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The August 2026 lease sale includes six parcels within five miles of the Theodore Roosevelt Wilderness Area, with some sitting as close as 1.25 miles from the park boundary. Four parcels directly overlap the trail itself.

Why It Matters for Public Lands: The threat to the Maah Daah Hey is more than a local land dispute. It is the clearest example yet of a fundamental reversal in how the federal government values public land, one in which recreation interests, more recently afforded equal footing alongside ranchers, loggers, and energy companies, have effectively been erased by the Trump administration’s aggressive push for oil and gas development. With last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act stripping the BLM of its discretion to protect any area from leasing, few recreation destinations on federal land are safe from the same fate. There is also a deeper structural problem: the Maah Daah Hey Trail is now covered under a 1988 resource management plan written before the trail even existed, meaning there is no current legal framework that even recognizes this place as something worth protecting. The August lease sale date is fixed. If you hike, ride, or care about the land that shaped the president most associated with American conservation, this is the story to watch right now.

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2. The Forest Service Just Closed Three-Quarters of Its Research Stations | Late April 2026

The Forest Service announced plans to close 57 of its 77 research stations, located across 31 states, merging them into a single organization in Fort Collins, Colorado. The closures are part of an agency-wide restructuring that also includes moving the Forest Service headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City and replacing nine regional offices with 15 state-level offices. Many of the stations slated for closure study fire behavior, forecast smoke dispersal, and help inform evacuation decisions. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said the move was designed to ensure research “will better align with the priorities of the administration” minerals, recreation, fire management, and active management of forests.

Why It Matters for Public Lands: Forest Service researchers monitor soil, air, and water quality; study how wildfire, invasive species, plant diseases, and climate change are impacting forest ecosystems; and conduct experiments to ensure that public lands remain healthy and productive for years to come. The timing is particularly alarming. Federal agencies expect severe fire conditions to arrive in eastern Washington and eastern Oregon as early as June due to a meager snowpack and early-drying soils. During President Trump’s first term, a similar relocation plan at the Bureau of Land Management prompted more than 87% of the main office’s employees to resign rather than move. There is every reason to expect the same outcome here. When the scientists leave, the institutional knowledge goes with them, and it does not come back.

3. Mining Companies Are Being Offered a No-Review Back Door Into Your National Forest | April 21, 2026

The Forest Service is proposing a new “notice-level operations” concept that would allow mining companies to explore for minerals on up to five acres of national forest land without needing Forest Service approval and without any requirement for public notice. Under current regulations, a company wanting to explore for minerals must prepare and submit a plan of operations, which the Forest Service evaluates for environmental impacts while seeking public input. The public comment period on the proposed rule closed April 21.

Why It Matters for Public Lands: If mining companies don’t have to submit plans, conduct environmental reviews, or notify the public, they will be more likely to go on proverbial fishing expeditions for future mines in national forests. The public would be kept in the dark about how their lands and resources are being used until it’s too late to object. This proposal has received almost no national coverage. Set alongside the NEPA overhaul and research station closures, it represents a third layer of the same strategy. Remove the science, remove the notice, then remove the last procedural guardrail. Comments submitted during the window are now part of the legal record and will matter if this goes to court.

4. The 2026 Farm Bill Passed the House And Public Hunting Access Got Left Behind | April 30, 2026

The House passed the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 on April 30 by a 224-200 vote. The bill reauthorizes the Conservation Reserve Program for five years, creates a new Forest Conservation Easement Program, and includes measures to improve watershed health. But there is a significant omission buried in the fine print. The Voluntary Public Access and Habitat Incentive Program (VPA-HIP), which pays landowners to open private land to public hunting and fishing, received no new mandatory funding.

Why It Matters for Public Lands: The VPA-HIP program is one of the most direct tools in existence for expanding hunting and fishing access for ordinary Americans. Not trophy ranchers, not private lease clubs, but everyday hunters and anglers who need somewhere to go. This matters beyond recreation. Hunters and anglers are the single largest source of dedicated conservation funding in the country, generating billions annually through license fees and excise taxes on equipment. Money that funds habitat restoration and land access programs that benefit every public land user. Cutting off their access doesn't just lose their use of the land, it loses their voice and their dollars from the conservation equation. Zeroing out VPA-HIP's mandatory funding while loudly claiming to support sportsmen is exactly the kind of betrayal that gets lost inside a 1,000-page bill. The bill now heads to the Senate, where policy disagreements are expected to extend the process. Hunters and anglers should contact their senators now and ask specifically about VPA-HIP funding before the Senate version is locked

5. Conservation and Housing Groups Agree: Selling Public Lands Won’t Fix the Housing Crisis | April 30, 2026

More than 60 conservation and affordable housing organizations jointly published “Shared Ground,” a policy paper arguing that the housing crisis is “fundamentally a policy and investment challenge, not the result of a simple shortage of land,” pointing to alternatives like preserving existing affordable housing, building on vacant land within neighborhoods, and zoning reform. The Idaho Conservation League’s public lands director warned that “proposals to sell off large tracts of public lands don’t meet affordable housing needs or public desires to protect open space.”

Why It Matters for Public Lands: Using housing as political cover for public land divestiture is one of the most effective rhetorical frames in play right now, because it forces conservationists into the appearance of opposing affordable housing. This coalition is calling that framing out directly, and the breadth of it. Affordable housing advocates, hunting organizations, wilderness groups, and tribal coalitions finding common ground is the most significant development in public lands politics in years. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has his own plan to use federal land for housing but has made no public moves since announcing it more than a year ago. Expect the housing argument to return. The coalition building against it is worth

Thank you for reading! Wild places don’t come back. Conservation Current tracks the policies, projects, and decisions eating away at America’s public lands, and holds the energy industry accountable when it takes the easy path over the right one. I believe in cleaner energy, it just has to be sited properly.

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Check out The Conservation Current Public Land Policy Tracker surfaces the five most impactful open comment periods and regulatory actions on federal public lands. Ranked by scale, irreversibility, and deadline urgency. Updated weekly. Always verify deadlines at regulations.gov before submitting.

Public Land Policy Tracker

Sources:

Story 1 - Oil & Gas Leasing / Maah Daah Hey Trail / Theodore Roosevelt National Park

• MyOutdoorJoy: https://www.myoutdoorjoy.com/the-one-big-beautiful-bill-act-and-the-battle-for-the-maah-daah-hey-trail/

• Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks: https://protectnps.org/2026/02/12/urge-blm-to-defer-august-2026-oil-gas-leasing-near-theodore-roosevelt-national-park-and-the-maah-daah-hey-trail/

• Badlands Conservation Alliance: https://www.badlandsconservationalliance.org/news/2025-06-07-meeting

Story 2 - Forest Service Research Station Closures

• Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: https://thebulletin.org/2026/04/its-just-madness-trump-administration-to-close-three-quarters-of-forest-service-research-stations/

• Stateline.org: https://stateline.org/2026/04/17/forest-service-plan-to-close-research-stations-stokes-fear-as-wildfire-season-approaches/

• OPB: https://www.opb.org/article/2026/04/11/forest-service-axes-research-stations-pnw/

• The Spokesman-Review / New York Times: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/apr/03/forest-service-will-close-research-stations-that-s/

Story 3 - Mining / Notice-Level Operations

• Center for Western Priorities: https://westernpriorities.org/2026/04/stealth-mining-is-coming-to-your-national-forest/

Story 4 - Farm Bill / VPA-HIP Funding

• U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (funding figures): https://www.fws.gov/program/wildlife-and-sport-fish-restoration/apportionments-and-licenses-data

• Department of Interior / Pittman-Robertson data: https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/sportsmen-and-sportswomen-generate-nearly-1-billion-conservation-funding

Story 5 - Housing & Public Lands Coalition

• KUNC / Mountain West News Bureau: https://www.kunc.org/regional-news/2026-04-30/housing-and-conservation-groups-propose-guardrails-for-housing-on-public-lands

84% of Montana voters want a ban on selling public lands.

80% of Republicans. 80% of Independents. 90% of Democrats. The University of Montana’s 2026 Voter Survey on Public Lands. Strongest “no” the pollsters say they have ever measured.

Good. That number matters.

It just isn’t the fight.

Selling public land is the loud version of the play. It triggers everybody. Hunters, ranchers, conservationists, the Boone & Crockett Club, Backcountry Hunters and Angler, the Wild Sheep Foundation, both Montana senators (only when they talk on podcasts or to the public), the Bitterroot county commission.

Mike Lee tried it last summer. 3 million acres. Tucked into the budget bill at midnight.

Then the Wilderness Society read the actual bill text. The language was loose enough that up to 250 million acres of BLM and Forest Service land were technically eligible to be nominated for sale. Lee said three. The bill said up to two hundred and fifty.

It died inside of a week.

Even Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy, went on record against it.

This is the part people miss. The “sell it” play is easy to beat.

The system works on this one. The bipartisan coalition is real. The polling is overwhelming. Sell-off pitches still come, but they're easy to kill. The land stays on the map.

So nobody serious is doing it that way anymore.

Here’s what they’re doing instead.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Passed, signed, currently law, that mandates quarterly oil and gas lease sales in Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Nevada, and Alaska. Locked into the calendar.

Both Montana senators voted yes. Daines. Sheehy. The same Sheehy who came out hard against the Lee amendment three weeks earlier.

It cut the federal onshore royalty rate from 16.67% back down to 12.5%. Taxpayers for Common Sense estimates the onshore-plus-offshore royalty cuts will cost the public around $6 billion over the next decade.

I’m currently working on a long form piece on how this royalty system works. The federal government has let oil companies report their own production, their own prices, and their own royalties owed since 1982. They call it the honor code. The honor ran out a long time ago.

Subscribe to The Conservation Current to get updates on when this is complete.

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It eliminated the expression-of-interest fee (killing the fee companies paid just to nominate a parcel for leasing. Speculative nominations are free again). It extended drilling permits to four years. It stripped federal land managers of most of their discretion to deny leases on parcels with conflicts. Wildlife corridor. Hunting unit. Hiking trail. If the protections weren't already written into a 15-year-old land-use plan, they don't exist. The lease goes through.

In January, BLM held the first quarterly Montana–North Dakota sale under the new law. 19 parcels. 4,116 acres. $8.65 million in receipts. Quiet little press release. No protest. No coalition.

That’s the play.

Then there’s the permitting side.

In November, the Trump administration’s Permitting Council added the Sheep Creek Project to the FAST-41 list. Sheep Creek sits at the headwaters of the Bitterroot River. The company developing it calls it the highest-grade rare earth and gallium deposit in North America.

FAST-41 doesn’t sell the land. It compresses environmental review and shrinks the public comment window.

Hundreds of Ravalli County residents packed a meeting in Hamilton in December. The county commissioners voted unanimously to ask the administration to remove Sheep Creek from the list. Sheehy sent a letter. Zinke sent a letter. Neither of them held a hearing. Neither of them put a hold on a nominee. The administration kept Sheep Creek on the list anyway, and the next news cycle started.

The administration kept it on anyway.

The Plan of Operations is now in front of the Bitterroot National Forest. The next decision is how light the environmental review gets to be.

Same outcome as a sale. Different paperwork.

Then the Congressional Review Act.

In late 2025, Congress used CRA resolutions to overturn Biden-era resource management plans and reopen 30 million acres in eastern Montana to coal mining. Daines cheered. Coal royalty rate also got cut in OBBBA from 12.5% down to 7%.

In December, the President signed CRA resolutions opening the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and most of the Western Arctic to oil and gas leasing.

In January, Interior submitted the Boundary Waters mineral withdrawal to Congress for CRA review, trying to undo a 20-year ban on sulfide-ore copper mining next to a 1.1-million-acre wilderness.

Earthjustice points out that prior to last year, Congress had never used the CRA to attack a public lands resource management plan. Or a mineral withdrawal. Or anything close to a national monument.

It’s a brand new weapon. It’s working.

And then there’s the part that came out two weeks ago.

The Wilderness Society obtained Department of the Interior emails through a public records request. They were shared with . The emails show Burgum’s DOI staff helped shape Mike Lee’s sell-off talking points last summer, even while the agency publicly denied involvement. The percentages Lee used in his FAQ came from a senior Interior official. Verbatim.

Public Domain

Trump’s Interior Dept. Crafted Talking Points For Mike Lee’s Public Land Sell-Off Scheme

Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee’s committee consulted with the Trump administration the day before Lee introduced…

Read more

3 months ago · 37 likes · 1 comment · Chris D'Angelo

That same office is now coordinating with HUD on a “housing task force” pursuing the same goal through quieter channels.

Same people. Same goal. Better packaging.

This is the disconnect the pollsters keep flagging. Voters say public lands are the issue that decides their vote. Then they vote for the same delegation that voted for OBBBA. The same delegation that fought the Lee amendment also voted yes on the bill that made Lee’s amendment unnecessary.

That isn’t quite hypocrisy.

It’s the bet.

The bet is that voters will reward them for blocking the visible thing, the sell-off, the auction block, the headline, and won’t track the quarterly lease sale, the royalty cut, the FAST-41 listing, the CRA resolution, the rule change. The visible fight is theater. The invisible one is the work.

The bet has been right so far. That puts the accountability on the voters too, which keeps you from sounding partisan while making the indictment sharper.

A 20-year lease isn’t a sale. A fast-tracked permit isn’t a sale. A royalty cut that hands operators billions isn’t a sale. A CRA resolution overturning a mineral withdrawal isn’t a sale.

The land stays federal. The use does not.

That’s the loophole the 84% doesn’t close.

So what do we need to watch.

Sheep Creek’s Plan of Operations decision at the Bitterroot National Forest.

The next quarterly Montana lease sale on the BLM calendar.

The Boundary Waters CRA resolution heading toward the President’s desk (he will pass it). The actual fight moves to Minnesota. DNR permits, state mineral leases, and whether Walz's administration has the spine to use the authority it still has. Plus a near-certain lawsuit arguing the CRA was never meant to undo a mineral withdrawal in the first place.

The Interior–HUD task force, still meeting with the same people who drafted last year’s failed pitch.

These are the fights worth showing up for. Public comment periods. Coalitions. State agencies. Local commissions. The unsexy stuff that actually moves the needle.

I built a free tracker to make it easier to follow. But trackers don’t save land. People do. This is a community thing. Always has been.

Public Lands Regulatory Tracker

The 84% is real. The instinct is bipartisan. The poll is the strongest signal Montana voters have sent on any public lands question in twelve years of asking. And I believe its similar in other western states.

The problem is the question.

We’re being polled on the loud fight. We’re losing the quiet one.

Thank you for reading! Wild places don’t come back. Conservation Current tracks the policies, projects, and decisions eating away at America’s public lands, and holds the energy industry accountable when it takes the easy path over the right one. I believe in clean energy, and energy security, but it has to be done correctly.

Subscribe now

I write this, build this, and fund this myself. If you find any value in this, a coffee goes a long way.

Buy me a Coffee

Check out The Conservation Current Public Land Policy Tracker surfaces the five most impactful open comment periods and regulatory actions on federal public lands. Ranked by scale, irreversibility, and deadline urgency. Updated weekly. Always verify deadlines at regulations.gov before submitting.

Public Land Policy Tracker

Sources:

University of Montana Crown of the Continent and Greater Yellowstone Initiative, 2026 Voter Survey on Public Lands;

Daily Montanan, Apr. 22, 2026 and Feb. 20, 2026;

Mountain Journal/Montana Free Press, Apr. 24, 2026; Missoula Current, “UM poll: Montanans back federal land,” 2026, and “Bitterroot rare-earth mining plan prompts more citizen concern,” Dec. 23, 2025;

BLM press releases, “Interior advances energy dominance through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (Jul. 22, 2025) and “BLM oil and gas lease sales in Montana and North Dakota generate over $8.6 million in revenue” (Jan. 13, 2026);

Taxpayers for Common Sense, “Oil, Gas, Coal Win Big in the One Big Beautiful Bill” (Aug. 28, 2025); Permitting Council press release, Nov. 19, 2025; Earthjustice, “The Little-Known Law Congress is Abusing to Sell Out Our Public Lands”;

High Country News, “Interior Department crafted talking points for public lands sell-off agenda” (Apr. 15, 2026);

Center for American Progress, Sep. 22, 2025.

"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

This Week’s Take

This week, the fate of the Boundary Waters hangs on a Senate vote that could arrive any day, while the administration continues pressing forward on the Roadless Rule despite one of the most lopsided public comment records in regulatory history. Quietly in the background, the Congressional Review Act is being stretched into territory it was never designed to reach. The tools being used: budget proposals, obscure legislative procedures, fast-tracked mining bills. This is a moment worth watching closely.

1. The Roadless Rule Is on Its Deathbed — And 60 Million Acres Hang in the Balance | April 9, 2026

The federal government is moving forward with plans to rescind the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, a 2001 policy that has protected around 60 million acres of public lands from road construction, logging, mining, and other development. Despite receiving over 600,000 public comments with up to 99% in support of keeping the rule. The administration is pressing ahead with the rollback. A final decision is expected in late 2026. Comments still matter and will live in the legal record for future lawsuit.

Why It Matters for Public Lands: The Roadless Rule has been a vital source of clean drinking water, with national forests acting as a natural water purifying system of roots and soil that filters water as it moves toward groundwater aquifers. Critics have called it “the single largest evisceration of public lands in U.S. history” if it goes through What makes this story particularly egregious and underreported, is that the administration received one of the most lopsided public comment records in regulatory history and is pressing forward anyway, raising serious questions about whether public participation in land management still means anything. Again, comments live for legal record, so they matter. Next step, understand where your representitives stand on this and vote in November.

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2. The Boundary Waters Senate Vote Could Happen This Week | April 13, 2026

House Republicans voted to undo former President Biden’s 20-year moratorium on the extraction of copper, nickel, and other minerals across more than 225,000 acres near the popular Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. If approved by the Republican-controlled Senate, the resolution would next go to President Trump, who has indicated he would sign it into law.

The Congressional Resolution deadline runs out towards the end of April. The vote could come anytime after Monday, April 13, and advocacy groups warn that when it’s scheduled, supporters typically get only 24 to 48 hours’ notice.

Why It Matters for Public Lands: If this resolution passes, it would do more than overturn the existing withdrawal. Under the Congressional Review Act, it would also prevent any future administration from issuing a substantially similar protection without new authorization from Congress. This is more then a story about one mine, it is a story about whether a procedural tool can permanently close the door on a category of protection for public lands.

3. Congress Is Moving to Let Mining Companies Skip Environmental Review on Public Lands | April 7, 2026

A suite of bills making their way through Congress would fast-track mining projects on public lands while eliminating environmental reviews and public input, using “national security” and “energy dominance” as cover. The most concerning of these is H.R. 7458, the Domestic ORE Act, sponsored by Representative Harriet Hageman of Wyoming. If passed, the bill would massively expand the amount of national public land that is open for mineral exploration with no environmental review or public input.

According to the Colorado College State of the Rockies Project 2026 poll, 70 percent of Western voters oppose fast-tracking mining and other projects on national public lands by limiting environmental reviews and local input.

Why It Matters for Public Lands: This bill is receiving almost no national coverage. If enacted, mining companies could move heavy equipment onto public land, including trails and recreation areas, with just a 15-day notice and no opportunity for communities to weigh in. The gap between what Western voters say they want and what Congress is advancing here is significant.

4. Grand Staircase-Escalante Becomes the First National Monument Targeted by the Congressional Review Act | April 1, 2026

Congress has already used the Congressional Review Act to overturn six BLM land management plans this session, covering lands in Montana, Wyoming, Alaska and North Dakota. But conservation groups say applying it to a national monument goes further. Monument designations are meant to elevate conservation over extraction, unlike standard resource management plans. If the management plan is rescinded, 700,000 acres that were briefly opened to mining and oil and gas leasing under the first Trump administration could again become available. The monument sits atop the Kaiparowits coal field, one of the largest untapped coal deposits in the country.

A coalition of 125 organizations has sent a letter to Congress urging them to oppose the effort, writing that the Congressional Review Act “was never meant to be a blunt instrument to attack public lands, including national monuments.”

Why It Matters for Public Lands: Six tribal nations that helped shape the plan through the Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition are opposing the effort. This is the first time in American history the Congressional Review Act has been used against a national monument management plan. If it succeeds, no monument management plan in the country can be considered secure.

5. The FY2027 Budget Proposes to Redirect Nearly Half of America's Core Conservation Fund | April 6, 2026

The White House budget proposes restricting the Land and Water Conservation Fund to easements and blocking new public land acquisition. Voters in red and blue states alike have consistently backed the LWCF because it is the single best tool for increasing access to public lands, especially for hunters and anglers.

The administration’s budget proposes to gut the LWCF by diverting nearly $387 million roughly 43% of the fund away from conservation, recreation, and sportsmen’s access needs across the country.

Why It Matters for Public Lands: The LWCF is funded entirely by offshore oil and gas royalties, it costs taxpayers nothing, and has supported parks, trails, wildlife refuges, and hunting access in every county in the country. The proposed diversion breaks a bipartisan commitment signed into law by President Trump himself in 2020. That contradiction is not getting the attention it deserves.

Thank you for reading! Wild places don’t come back. Conservation Current tracks the policies, projects, and decisions eating away at America’s public lands, and holds the energy industry accountable when it takes the easy path over the right one.

Subscribe now

I write this, build this, and fund this myself. If you find any value in this, a coffee goes a long way.

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Check out The Conservation Current Public Land Policy Tracker surfaces the five most impactful open comment periods and regulatory actions on federal public lands. Ranked by scale, irreversibility, and deadline urgency. Updated weekly. Always verify deadlines at regulations.gov before submitting.

Public Land Policy Tracker

This year I took my daughter camping for the first time. Public land near Death Valley. She’s one, so she won’t remember any of it. She doesn’t know what she was in the middle of. I do. I drove home thinking about what that land is, who it belongs to, and whether it’ll still be there when she’s old enough to ask about it.

I’m still working out the answer.

When Empires Need to Feed Themselves

There’s a place near Death Valley where the light goes sideways in the late afternoon and the whole desert turns a color that doesn’t have a name. My wife and I sat in it, took some pictures, appreciated the beauty. My one-year-old daughter had no idea. She was just there, fully present and completely unaware of what she was in the middle of. I was thinking about how old the rocks were and how recently we showed up and what we’d done with the time. It was one of the better afternoons I’ve had.

That kind of afternoon is only possible because that land is public. Held in common. Yours, mine, hers. And right now that land is being looked at very differently by very powerful people. Less like a desert that turns colors without names. More like a supply chain problem to be solved.

We are living through the slow-motion end of the global order America built after World War II. The petrodollar is being challenged. Allies are hedging. China controls the minerals that power the next century.

Lets add minerals to the energy security conversation, because the gap in our mineral supply chain is actually more dangerous than our energy gap, and both problems point at the same piece of ground. The 640 million acres of public land this country holds in common are suddenly the most strategically important real estate on Earth.

At what point does saving the nation destroy the thing worth saving? That’s the question nobody is asking loudly enough.

China began restricting exports of antimony, gallium, and germanium to the United States in December 2024. Rare earth restrictions followed in April 2025. Battery supply chain controls in October 2025. These are all leverage. We handed it to them, slowly, over decades, while we were not paying attention.

Which brings us to a question Aldo Leopold tried to answer in 1949, and few in Washington has seriously attempted since.

What do we owe the land?

The Ground Beneath the Strategy

The federal government manages approximately 640 million surface acres, 28 percent of all land in the United States. The Bureau of Land Management alone oversees 244 million surface acres and 714 million acres of mineral rights beneath lands whose surfaces may belong to other agencies or private owners.

Nearly half of the eleven western states is federal land. Nevada is 80 percent federal. The West is a public commons, and most Americans have never thought of it that way. That is about to change.

Federal lands produce 26 percent of US oil, 13 percent of natural gas, and nearly half of all coal. They generated $16.45 billion in energy revenue in fiscal year 2024. But the critical minerals picture is where the pressure is really building.

The Thacker Pass lithium deposit in Nevada, the largest known lithium deposit in the country and the third-largest in the world, sits on BLM land. Resolution Copper in Arizona lies beneath the Tonto National Forest. The Twin Metals cobalt and nickel deposit in Minnesota borders the Boundary Waters. The Idaho Cobalt Belt crosses Forest Service and BLM land.

The minerals we need most are almost entirely on the land we share. So what does that mean for what happens to it?

The Numbers Behind the Dependency

The 2025 USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries lay it out plainly. The US is 100 percent import-reliant for 15 minerals and more than 50 percent reliant for 46 of them. The 2025 Critical Minerals List expanded to 60 minerals, adding 10 new minerals including copper, uranium, and phosphate.

China’s dominance is mainly around processing more then mining. China refines approximately 90 percent of the world’s rare earths, approximately 60-70 percent of cobalt, 70 percent of lithium into battery-grade chemicals, and 90 percent of battery-grade graphite. For 19 of 20 strategic minerals assessed by the International Energy Agency, China is the leading processor, averaging around 70 percent market share. That share has grown since 2020.

The IEA projects lithium demand will increase fivefold by 2040. Copper faces a projected 30 percent supply gap by 2035. Full separation from Chinese supply chains would require the US to mine and process domestically minerals that currently flow almost entirely through Chinese facilities.

The Department of Defense has invested $439 million since 2020 rebuilding domestic rare earth supply chains. Congress put $2 billion into the National Defense Stockpile in 2025 and another $5 billion toward critical mineral supply chains.

The urgency is real. The question is whether urgency becomes an excuse to skip the hard thinking about what we are actually giving up.

The Energy Math Actually Works

Here is something that keeps getting buried: the United States is already a net energy exporter. In 2024, the US produced 103.3 quadrillion BTUs against total consumption of 94.2 quads. We produce more than we use.

NREL’s modeling of a 100 percent clean electricity grid by 2035 estimates a direct land footprint of 14.3 million acres for wind, solar, and transmission. Less than 1 percent of US land. Ninety-three percent of wind energy built since 2000 went onto farmland and rangeland, using less than 4 percent of the total lease area. Rooftop and parking lot solar alone could generate 50 percent of US electricity with zero new land required. Add solar-plus-storage on some farmland and brownfields, and the case gets a lot stronger.

And then there is geothermal. The USGS estimates 517,800 megawatts of enhanced geothermal potential in the western US, nearly all of it on federal land. Steady, round-the-clock power with minimal surface disturbance. You use underground heat without completely destroying land.

The path to energy and mineral security does not require sacrificing every intact desert basin in the American West. So why does the current policy conversation make it feel like those are the only two options?

The Land We Have Already Broken

There are approximately 450,000 contaminated industrial sites across the United States covering an estimated 5 million acres. The EPA and NREL have already screened more than 190,000 of them for renewable energy potential. There are between 100,000 and 500,000 abandoned hardrock mine sites across the country, at least 140,000 on federal land.

My daughter sat in the dirt on land that looked untouched. She won’t remember it. But somewhere not far from where we sat, there are mines from the last gold rush that nobody ever cleaned up. Open shafts. Waste piles. Acid seeping into groundwater nobody monitors anymore. The estimated cleanup cost for abandoned hardrock mines runs between $32 and $72 billion with no dedicated funding to cover it. The companies that dug and left paid nothing. The public carries the bill.

That is where the extraction conversation should start. We have 15 million acres of land we already damaged that could host much of the energy and mineral infrastructure this country needs. Why are we talking about the intact places first?

What the Science Says About Healing

In Wyoming sagebrush country, researchers found that sagebrush takes at least 87 years to recover on abandoned well pads. Wildflower communities showed virtually no recovery even after 87 years. A USGS study found that formal reclamation did not speed up plant recovery compared to simply walking away. It improved grass cover. It did not bring back the sagebrush or rebuild the soil biology the ecosystem depends on.

A 2024 study in Restoration Ecology evaluated one of the most carefully managed mine restoration programs in the world, Alcoa’s bauxite operation in Western Australia, watched for 40 years. Restoration quality scored 2 out of 5. Two-thirds of the plant species that should have been there were absent or severely depleted.

Acid mine drainage deserves its own paragraph. No large-scale hardrock mine has shown it can stop acid drainage once it starts. More than 40 US mines generate between 17 and 27 billion gallons of contaminated water every year, indefinitely. Ninety percent of mines that predicted they would not have this problem later developed it anyway.

Water makes everything worse in the arid West. The Thacker Pass lithium mine is projected to use 1.7 billion gallons of water per year for at least 46 years in a basin where actual water availability is far lower than models estimated. At Silver Peak, Nevada, the only operating US lithium mine, nearby well levels have dropped. Monitoring reports attributed the decline specifically to mine dewatering.

When the water is gone, what replaces it?

What Other Countries Figured Out

Norway taxes petroleum profits at 78 percent and deposits all net revenue into a national fund now worth $2.2 trillion, roughly $350,000+ per Norwegian citizen. The fund was built on the principle that a finite resource belongs to all citizens including future ones. Norway banned routine gas flaring in the 1970s and got wealthy without wrecking its environment.

Canada requires mining companies to file closure plans and post full financial bonds before a single shovel goes into the ground. The legal duty to consult Indigenous communities now applies before mining claims are even registered. Canada passed UNDRIP implementation legislation in 2021.

Australia charges mining royalties of 2.5 to 7.5 percent. Western Australia collected $12 billion in mining royalties in fiscal year 2024 to 2025. Environmental rules require companies to avoid harm first, reduce it second, and only then offset what cannot be avoided.

In all three countries the public gets paid for public resources. Companies must prove they can clean up before they dig. Indigenous communities have real legal standing. Why don’t we?

The Law Written for a Different Century

The General Mining Law of 1872 was signed by Ulysses Grant. It charges zero federal royalties on extracted hardrock minerals. No environmental requirements. No reclamation mandate. Companies do not even have to report how much they extracted. The annual fee to hold a mining claim is $200.

Oil and gas companies pay royalties of 12.5 to 16.67 percent on federal land. Coal companies pay 8 to 12.5 percent. Those industries sent $16.45 billion to the Treasury in fiscal year 2024. Hardrock mining companies paid essentially nothing in federal royalties while extracting minerals worth tens of billions.

The Biden administration put together more than 60 reform recommendations in 2024. A federal royalty. Mandatory cleanup bonds before production begins. A dedicated fund for abandoned mine reclamation. Congress did not act on any of them.

The National Environmental Policy Act was functionally restructured in early 2025. The rules agencies use to implement it were rescinded. The Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County said agencies only need to analyze effects within their own regulatory authority, not broader consequences separate upstream or downstream projects. Major extraction projects will now face lighter review at exactly the moment when more extraction is being proposed.

A law from 1872 is governing decisions about minerals that did not become strategic priorities until 2020. Does that make sense to anyone?

The Communities Being Skipped

The Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada sits near the site of an 1865 cavalry massacre of Paiute and Shoshone people. The BLM’s consultation process consisted of three rounds of mailings to three tribal governments during the COVID pandemic. No in-person meetings. No consent process.

A February 2025 report from Human Rights Watch and the ACLU concluded the project violated international human rights standards. The 9th Circuit allowed it to proceed.

Most major critical mineral deposits in the United States are located near Indigenous lands. The 1872 Mining Law provides no mechanism for meaningful consent. Indigenous communities have managed these landscapes for thousands of years. They make up 5 percent of global population and steward land containing 85 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity. The Haudenosaunee Seventh Generation Principle holds that decisions should benefit children seven generations into the future, roughly 150 years from now.

Sagebrush takes 87 years to recover. Acid drainage runs indefinitely. A 150-year planning horizon is minimum the science demands.

What would it look like to actually include these communities in the decisions that affect them most?

Five Principles for What Comes Next

The strategic emergency is real. The ecological reckoning is real. They don’t have to produce the same outcome they always have, which is extraction first and consequences paid by the land and by the people who live closest to it.

A modern land ethic for the age of critical minerals rests on five principles.

Extract from already-wounded land first. The 450,000 brownfield industrial sites. The 500,000 abandoned mines. The rooftops. The parking lots. The agricultural land where wind turbines already coexist with farming. This is not idealism. It is the only rational sequence. We have 5 million acres of degraded land that needs reclamation and could host the energy infrastructure this country needs. We should start there.

The public captures fair value and full-cost accountability. A federal hardrock royalty of 8 to 12 percent. Mandatory pre-production closure plans and reclamation bonds with no self-bonding loophole. A dedicated abandoned mine fund modeled on SMCRA’s coal program. Operators pay the full cost of what they do, before they do it. That is how every peer nation operates. We are the outlier.

Some landscapes are beyond extraction. The 112 million acres of designated Wilderness. Critical wildlife migration corridors. Sites of irreplaceable Indigenous cultural significance. The science on sagebrush recovery, on acid mine drainage, and on mine restoration outcomes makes clear that extraction in arid western ecosystems causes damage measurable in centuries. A modern land ethic draws hard lines. Strategic necessity is not a blank check.

Indigenous peoples are rights-holders, not stakeholders. Meaningful consent from tribal nations is a prerequisite for extraction on lands with Indigenous cultural, spiritual, or treaty connections. Not mailings. Not notices. Consent. This is both a moral obligation and, increasingly, an international legal standard the US has refused to meet.

The planning horizon must match the consequences. A mine that generates acid drainage in perpetuity should not be permitted based on a 20-year economic model. A sagebrush ecosystem that takes 87 years to recover should not be sacrificed for a 10-year production cycle. The decisions being made now will determine what is left in 2075, in 2100, in 2150. Leopold’s land community, Stegner’s geography of hope, the Seventh Generation Principle all converge on the same demand: think further than the next earnings call.

What I Want Her to Find

My daughter won’t remember that trip. She’s one. The light, the rocks, the dirt, none of it is going to stick. That is fine. That is not why I took her.

I took her because I wanted her to have been there. Because I think something gets into you from a place like that even before you have the words for it. And because I want her to be able to go back when she does have the words.

Whether that is possible depends on decisions being made right now, mostly by people who are not thinking about who might need that land in 25 years.

Wallace Stegner wrote that wilderness is the geography of hope. Not a resource. Not a recreation asset. Hope. The kind that sustains a civilization's sense of what it is capable of, what it is worth preserving, and why the project of living here matters.

Leopold wrote that we abuse land because we see it as something we own. We stop abusing it when we see it as a community we belong to. My daughter belongs to that place already, even if she has no idea. The question is whether we will leave it for her.

Neither man was naive. Neither was arguing for zero extraction. They were arguing for the one thing American resource policy has never consistently demonstrated: the idea that the land has a claim on us, not just the other way around.

The strategic crisis bearing down on us is real. The petrodollar is weakening. The Chinese export controls are already here. The mineral deficit is already widening. The country will need to make hard decisions about what to dig up and where.

A country with 450,000 contaminated sites ready for redevelopment, nearly 2,000 gigawatts of untapped rooftop solar capacity, and more enhanced geothermal potential than almost anywhere on Earth does not have to answer the mineral security crisis by tearing through every intact landscape in the West. We have the degraded land. We have the legal tools to fix the 1872 Mining Law. We have the examples of countries that figured out how to extract at scale without leaving the land as a sacrifice zone.

What we are short on is the political will.

The empire does not collapse all at once. It runs out of the things it forgot it needed. Right now we are forgetting that intact land, clean water, and functioning ecosystems are not obstacles to national security. They are part of what we are supposed to be securing.

Can we remember that before it is too late to act on it?

Thank you for reading! Wild places don’t come back. Conservation Current tracks the policies, projects, and decisions eating away at America’s public lands, and holds the energy industry accountable when it takes the easy path over the right one.

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Check out The Conservation Current Public Land Policy Tracker surfaces the five most impactful open comment periods and regulatory actions on federal public lands. Ranked by scale, irreversibility, and deadline urgency. Updated weekly. Always verify deadlines at regulations.gov before submitting.

Public Land Policy Tracker

I used Claude to help me gather the primary source data. Then went back to confirm primary sources and I wrote this piece.

Sources: EIA, USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025, NREL, IEA Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025, U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. GAO, Earthworks, Princeton Net-Zero America, Ecological Society of America, Wiley Ecosphere, Restoration Ecology (Campbell et al. 2024), Human Rights Watch, ACLU, Aldo Leopold Foundation, PNAS, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Province of British Columbia, Canada.ca, Norges Bank Investment Management

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1. One Company Can Now Own Unlimited Federal Mining Territory. Nobody’s Talking About It.

Effective March 23, 2026, the Bureau of Land Management finalized a rule removing statewide acreage limitations for hardrock mineral permits and leases. That’s this week. Barely registered anywhere.

Here’s what that actually means. For decades, there was a cap on how much federal land any single entity could hold in hardrock mineral permits or leases within a given state. The rule existed specifically to prevent monopolization. The BLM itself acknowledged the provision was put there “to prevent any one entity from monopolizing access to the mineral resources in a particular state.”

They removed it anyway. Decided it wasn’t statutorily required, so why keep it?

The change was packaged inside a broader Interior announcement rescinding 18 BLM regulations under Secretary Burgum’s deregulatory agenda. Described as eliminating “unnecessary barriers to economic growth.” That framing is doing a lot of work. “Unnecessary” is one way to describe a rule that kept a single mining company from locking up a state’s entire mineral estate on federal land.

The critical minerals push gives this political cover. Say “national security” and “supply chain” and you can move a lot of policy without anyone blinking. But the beneficiaries here aren’t mom-and-pop prospectors. They’re the companies with enough capital to accumulate that kind of acreage in the first place.

We gave away the anti-monopoly protection. Without a single news cycle.

2. They’re Dismantling the Country’s Water Nervous System. Nobody’s Noticed.

The Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposes a 90% cut to USGS ecological research and a 39% reduction across the agency overall. Including the elimination of its Ecosystems Mission Area entirely. Not a trim. An elimination.

The piece flying completely under the radar is the stream gauge network. The USGS operates 12,165 stream gauges. A real-time system providing flood warnings, drought tracking, water quality data, and the foundational science for everything we know about how western water moves. Interior is requesting 22% less in 2026 for the program that runs it.

And the operational damage is already happening. DOGE travel restrictions are now preventing field technicians from staying overnight. Which for remote gauges in the West means critical maintenance isn’t getting done. You can’t drive to a gauge on the upper Gila and back in a day. GSA has proposed terminating leases for 25 USGS water science centers, including offices in Bozeman, Moab, Spokane, and Cheyenne.

The stated rationale is revealing. OMB wants to eliminate USGS programs focused on “social agendas (e.g., climate change)” and instead focus on “achieving dominance in energy and critical minerals.”

Here’s the problem. Ranchers use these gauges. Farmers use these gauges. Cities use them for flood response. You cannot credibly claim energy and minerals dominance without knowing baseline water conditions. Without that monitoring infrastructure, you’re not managing extraction. You’re extracting blindly and hoping no one can prove the damage.

That’s not an accident. It’s a design choice.

3. Now, Something Real: Geothermal Is Actually Happening

I try not to be reflexively cynical here. Credit where it’s due.

Fervo Energy’s Cape Generating Station in Utah, the first large-scale commercial enhanced geothermal system in the United States, is scheduled to come online in June 2026. Second and third units expected in January 2027. Two additional phases already planned. The company has signed power purchase agreements totaling 320 megawatts with Southern California Edison.

What makes enhanced geothermal different is that it doesn’t require naturally occurring underground hot water. EGS uses horizontal drilling and fracking techniques adapted from the oil and gas industry to create hydrothermal reservoirs where they don’t naturally exist. Which means geothermal could eventually be developed almost anywhere. Not just the geology-lucky corners of Nevada and Utah.

The USGS estimates 135 gigawatts of potential EGS capacity in the Great Basin alone. Other projections put economically viable national capacity at 90 to 150 gigawatts by 2050. For context, the entire existing U.S. geothermal fleet is about 2.7 gigawatts.

Geothermal has also found the rare political sweet spot. The Trump administration has consistently treated it more favorably than other clean energy technologies. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act aggressively phased out solar and wind incentives and largely preserved credits for geothermal. That won’t last forever. But for now the momentum is real, the technology is proven, and the resource is enormous.

Baseload. Carbon-free. On already-permitted federal land in Utah. That’s the story.

4. And One Quiet Win for the Land Itself

Not everything is a fight. Sometimes people just do the right thing.

The Appalachian Mountain Club is returning 1,700 acres of wetlands and forest to the Penobscot Nation. No cost, no restrictions. And they’ll restore road access that has been closed to both the public and the Tribe for two decades before the transfer.

Also out of Maine: 166 fish passage restoration projects in the 100-Mile Wilderness have reconnected over 162 miles of streams. Unglamorous, patient, effective conservation. The kind that rarely gets a headline.

The bigger picture is that river restoration works. When rivers flow freely, they reduce flood risks, support fisheries, and allow biodiversity to bounce back faster than expected. Research on restored ecosystems consistently shows recovery timelines that outpace early projections.

The bad news is structural and accelerating. The good news is that the land responds when we let it. Both things are true.

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Thank you for reading! I highlight threats to public lands and the energy industry’s impact. I believe clean energy is the future, and ALL energy projects should prioritize private land first to keep wild places wild. When energy extraction is needed on public lands all projects must restore the land after extraction. Public lands are unique and once lost, they’re gone forever.

Sources:

Story 1: BLM Hardrock Mining Acreage Cap

• Federal Register, “Rescission of Regulations Regarding Leasing of Solid Minerals Other Than Coal and Oil Shale,” Feb. 19, 2026. federalregister.gov

• Bureau of Land Management, “Interior Slashes Outdated Energy Regulations to Boost Economic Growth on Public Lands.” blm.gov

Story 2: USGS Stream Gauges

• Stroud Water Research Center, “USGS Cuts to Water Resources Threaten Health and Safety,” Feb. 4, 2026. stroudcenter.org

• Western Landowners Alliance / On Land, “Stream Gaging Capacity Cuts Could Be Devastating for the West.” onland.westernlandowners.org

• Bay Journal, “USGS Faces Big Cuts, Endangering Chesapeake Science,” June 25, 2025. bayjournal.com

Story 3: Fervo Geothermal

• U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Enhanced Geothermal Systems Could Expand Geothermal Power Generation.” eia.gov

• Foley Hoag Energy & Climate Counsel, “New Daylight for Geothermal,” March 16, 2026. foleyhoag.com

Story 4: AMC / Penobscot Land Return

• Appalachian Mountain Club, “25 Reasons to Feel Hopeful About Conservation in 2026,” Dec. 19, 2025. outdoors.org

Somewhere in the Sonoran Desert, a 33-foot tower is watching.

It runs on solar. It sees three miles in every direction. It classifies what it finds whether its a person, vehicle, animal, then pings a Border Patrol agent’s phone without a human ever reviewing the footage. It was built by a defense tech startup, Anduril. The government bought 300 of them. Most sit on or adjacent to federal public land.

That detail matters more than it looks like it does.

Here is the thing nobody is saying plainly: the same public lands being mined and drained to power artificial intelligence are now being monitored and “saved” by AI conservation tools. That loop, extraction feeding the machine that watches what’s being extracted, is not a metaphor. It is a supply chain. And no one in any agency or administration has ever looked at it whole.

U.S. data centers consumed 176 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023. The Department of Energy (DOE) projects that figure doubling or tripling by 2028. A meaningful share of that energy comes from coal, gas, and uranium pulled from federal lands. The Colorado River Basin is being tapped to cool data centers in Phoenix and Las Vegas and lost 52 cubic kilometers of water storage since 2002. Tech companies have contracted for over 10 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity in roughly one year. Uranium production surged from 2023 to 2024. Most domestic uranium deposits sit on or near federal land.

Meanwhile, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) deploys acoustic AI to detect endangered birds in national parks. The Forest Service is building AI-assisted fire behavior tools. The Bureau of Reclamation is using machine learning to manage drought on the Colorado. These are real tools doing real work.

But who is measuring whether the conservation return justifies the resource cost? What is the net ledger? Extraction impact on one side, monitoring benefit on the other. Does anyone have the mandate or the data to calculate it?

I don’t know.

The surveillance question is even less resolved.

Border Patrol’s autonomous towers are already operating across public lands with no comprehensive federal law governing what they collect, how long they keep it, or who they share it with. A December 2024 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found Customs and Border Protection (CBP) failed all six Fair Information Practice Principles for its surveillance systems. Zero for six. A complete failure. Yosemite is running license plate readers at park entrances, retaining vehicle records indefinitely. The Tohono O’odham Nation is surrounded by hidden Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) cameras stretching 100 miles north of the border.

These tools were built for one purpose. Management. History suggests they rarely stay there. Standing Rock showed what surveillance infrastructure deployed near energy projects does when it gets redirected toward protesters and indigenous communities. The question isn’t whether that risk exists. It clearly does. The question is what governance looks like before the next Standing Rock, not after.

Look up Surveillance at Standing Rock (2016–2017) if you have not heard of it.

The biggest gap isn’t a missing study or a funding shortfall. It’s institutional.

Data center siting decisions. Where to build, how much water to pull, which grids to tap are made through energy permits, water rights transfers, and utility interconnection agreements. None of those processes require a public land use review. None of them ask what the cumulative impact is on the landscape being resourced. The Trump administration’s AI infrastructure executive order explicitly streamlined that review further. The Biden executive order that tried to impose some integration was revoked before implementation.

So we are left with the following: the most consequential land use decisions of this decade are being made by default, through processes designed for individual projects, with no framework capable of seeing them together.

Some questions worth sitting with:

Who decides how AI infrastructure intersects with public land policy, and is anyone actually deciding, or is it just happening?

When AI is simultaneously degrading and monitoring the same watershed, what does “conservation” even mean in that context?

If surveillance tools deployed on public lands can be redirected against the people who use them like hunters, hikers, activists, tribal members, what accountability exists before that happens, rather than after?

Does the conservation benefit of a wildlife monitoring AI justify the water and energy cost of running it? Has anyone tried to measure that?

And the one underneath all of it: 348 million Americans own these lands. When did they get a vote on any of this?

Back to the tower in the Sonoran Desert.

It watches a landscape sitting south of uranium deposits needed for the nuclear plants powering AI data centers. On the ridge above it, there may be a camera running a machine learning model trying to detect a Sonoran pronghorn. Both tools draw from the same stressed infrastructure. Neither was placed there through any process that considered the other.

Nobody decided the eye that watches the land should eat the land to keep watching.

It just happened. And we haven’t figured out what to do about it.

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Thank you for reading! I highlight threats to public lands and the energy industry’s impact. I believe clean energy is the future, and ALL energy projects should prioritize private land first to keep wild places wild. When energy extraction is needed on public lands all projects must restore the land after extraction. Public lands are unique and once lost, they’re gone forever.

Sources

Energy / Federal Lands Extraction

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report (LBNL-2001637), December 2024. Direct source for the 176 TWh figure and 2028 projections.

International Energy Agency: Energy and AI, April 2025. Source for AI’s share of data center power (5–15% today, 35–50% by 2030) and natural gas supplying 40%+ of U.S. data center electricity.

Bureau of Land Management: Oil and Gas: About. Source for federal lands supplying ~41% of U.S. coal, ~15% of oil, ~9% of gas.

U.S. Energy Information Administration: Domestic Uranium Production Report, Annual. Source for uranium production surge (50,000 lbs in 2023 to 677,000 lbs in 2024).

U.S. Department of the Interior / USGS: Final 2025 List of Critical Minerals. Source for uranium’s addition to the list and the expanded 60-mineral inventory.

Water

Geophysical Research Letters (Abdelmohsen et al., 2025): Declining Freshwater Availability in the Colorado River Basin Threatens Sustainability of Its Critical Groundwater Supplies. Source for 52 km³ water storage loss since 2002 and the explicit data center citation.

LBNL 2024 Report (same as above): Source for 17 billion gallons direct consumption and 211 billion gallons indirect.

OPB: As Google’s Water Demands Grow, The Dalles Aims to Pull More from Mount Hood Forest, January 2026. Source for Mount Hood National Forest transfer lobbying and Google’s share of The Dalles water supply.

Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press: Oregon’s City of The Dalles Agrees to Reveal Google’s Local Water Usage. Source for the trade secret fight and Google paying $153,000 in legal fees.

Ceres: Water Impacts from Data Centers, September 2025. Source for 32% of U.S. data centers in high water stress areas and Phoenix 900% consumption projection.

AI Conservation Tools

USGS: Artificial Intelligence in the USGS Ecosystems Mission Area: Fish and Wildlife. Source for SeeOtter, BirdNET deployment, waterfowl counting, Klamath fish ID, tegu detection.

USFWS: 2024 Range-wide Indiana Bat and Northern Long-eared Bat Survey Guidelines. Source for formal incorporation of acoustic AI.

Upstream Tech: Integrating and Evaluating AI Forecasts for Bureau of Reclamation. Source for HydroForecast deployment on western basins.

MDPI / AI journal: AI for Wildfire Management: From Prediction to Detection, Simulation, and Impact Analysis, 2025. Source for the “operational use remains limited” finding.

Surveillance

GAO: GAO-25-107302, December 2024. Source for CBP failing all six Fair Information Practice Principles.

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Customs & Border Protection Fails Baseline Privacy Requirements for Surveillance Technology, December 2024. Corroborates GAO findings, maps tower deployments.

Arizona Mirror: Hidden in Plain Sight: Surveillance at the Arizona Border, February 2026. Source for the ALPR network on Tohono O’odham land.

NPS: License Plate Reader Pilot, Yosemite National Park. Direct agency source for the Yosemite LPR program details.

The Intercept / Grist: Leaked Documents Detail Standing Rock Surveillance and How TigerSwan Pitched Its Pipeline Playbook After Standing Rock. Source for Standing Rock surveillance precedent and TigerSwan operations.

In These Times: How Border Patrol Occupied the Tohono O’odham Nation. Source for Ned Norris Jr. congressional testimony.

Governance / Policy

White & Case: Trump Administration Issues Executive Order to Streamline Data Center Development. Analysis of EO 14318 and NEPA streamlining provisions.

Morgan Lewis: President Biden’s Executive Order: Accelerating AI Infrastructure Development on Federal Lands. Analysis of EO 14141 and its revocation.

Davis Graham: The Trump Administration’s Progress to Site Data Centers on Federal Lands: Initial Steps but Work Remains. Source for DOE’s four selected federal sites and BLM’s lack of identified parcels.

Walk across the Colorado Plateau and you’ll see it. Dark. Lumpy. Almost alien. A strange, textured surface coating the ground between the shrubs.

It doesn’t look like much.

Step on it and you’ll hear a faint crunch. That sound is up to 120 years of biological work being destroyed in a single stride. In some cases, more than a thousand.

It’s called a biological soil crust. Biocrust. A living community of cyanobacteria, lichens, mosses, and fungi woven into the top few millimeters of the earth’s surface. In the undisturbed stretches of the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau, biocrusts can cover up to 70 percent of the ground between plants.

Most people have never heard of them.

They fix nitrogen into the soil. They lock carbon out of the atmosphere. They bind the surface particles together so the desert doesn’t blow away. USGS researchers describe them as a cornerstone of dryland health.

Biocrusts cover roughly 12 percent of the Earth’s entire land surface, according to a 2018 global mapping study published in Nature Geoscience. In arid and semi-arid regions, which make up about 40 percent of all land on Earth, they dominate the ground between plants. They are the dominant life form under your feet across a massive portion of the American West.

And we are scraping them off to build solar panels.

That sentence deserves to sit for a second.

The Bureau of Land Management manages 245 million acres of federal public land, most of it across the arid West. Dozens of large-scale solar projects have been approved or are currently being permitted across this landscape. The Biden administration pushed hard on this. The logic made sense on paper: federal land is vast, the sun is relentless, we need the power.

But there’s a problem. A quiet, slow, generational one.

When a utility-scale solar array goes in, the ground gets graded. The biocrust gets scraped off. USGS Research Ecologist Jayne Belnap, admitted to the National Academy of Sciences largely for her work on Western biocrusts, documented what recovery looks like after mechanical disturbance in the Mojave Desert. Cyanobacterial crusts need about 120 years. Mosses take up to 766 years. Lichens, the most complex and ecologically important component of mature crusts, may need somewhere between 2,000 and 3,800 years to recover.

A solar array has a lifespan of about 30 years.

The panels get decommissioned, upgraded, replaced twice over. The desert is still at year one of its recovery.

There’s another piece of this that doesn’t get talked about much. Biocrusts are the primary reason desert soils don’t blow away. A 2022 study in Nature Geoscience found that biocrusts reduce global atmospheric dust emissions by approximately 60 percent. When they’re destroyed across large areas, the dust suppression disappears. Bare soil becomes mobile. Invasive grasses move in. Wildfire risk climbs. The damage doesn’t stop at the fence line.

Speaking of fence lines.

Federal law requires utility-scale solar facilities to be fenced. The standard is chain-link or woven wire, at least six feet tall. That fence solves a security problem and creates an ecological one. Pronghorn, mule deer, elk, and bighorn sheep cannot get through it. Pronghorn especially, because unlike deer and elk, they don’t jump. They crawl under. Woven-wire fencing at ground level is essentially a wall to them.

Research published in the journal Ecosphere in 2022 found that pronghorn encounters with fencing significantly alter their movement, and in some cases block it entirely. The average pronghorn in one Wyoming study encountered a fence 248 times a year. A separate University of Wyoming study found that a single fence block in the Red Desert excluded pronghorn from more than 104,000 acres of habitat. The Wildlands Network is currently running the only known GPS-collar study of pronghorn near utility-scale solar, tracking 75 female animals around an 1,100-acre facility in New Mexico. The research is ongoing because frankly, nobody has studied this enough before approving thousands of acres of fenced solar on the same landscapes these animals migrate across.

This is the part of the clean energy story that rarely makes it into the press release. Biocrusts scraped. Migration corridors fenced. Both happening on public land, on habitat that evolved over thousands of years, to power a future that could theoretically be built somewhere else entirely.

Because here’s what makes all of this genuinely hard to excuse.

We don’t need to build on any of it.

The DOE’s own Solar Futures Study, published by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in 2021, found that the largest possible solar buildout scenario for the entire country through 2050 requires about 10.3 million acres. That number sounds large until you look at what the EPA has already mapped.

The EPA’s RE-Powering America’s Land Initiative has pre-screened more than 190,000 contaminated sites covering over 43 million acres for renewable energy development. Brownfields. Superfund sites. Former landfills. Abandoned mine lands. Land that isn’t doing anything, has no functioning ecosystem, and in many cases already has road access and transmission infrastructure nearby. A Center for American Progress analysis of that same EPA data found those sites could host more than 940 gigawatts of clean energy. We need 10.3 million acres. The EPA has pre-identified 43 million.

The choice to build on intact public land is an economic and permitting preference. Public land is cheaper. Federal approvals can be faster than navigating brownfield redevelopment. The companies building these projects are making a rational business decision and that decision keeps landing on wild public land when the alternative is sitting pre-mapped, pre-screened, in every state in the country.

There is a reason this story doesn’t get told. Biocrusts don’t have a charismatic spokesperson. There’s no endangered crust to put on a poster. They look like dirt. Pronghorn do have advocates, but the specific research connecting solar fencing to population-level effects is still being collected because the permitting happened faster than the science.

Solar is essential. The grid has to change. None of that is the argument.

The argument is that we keep choosing whose land gets sacrificed for that future, and the choice keeps landing on wild public land, on ancient soil communities, on migration routes that predate every fence ever built in this country. We are making that choice when we don’t have to. The degraded land is already there, waiting, pre-screened by the federal government itself.

The desert is patient. We are not.

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Thank you for reading! I highlight threats to public lands and the energy industry’s impact. I believe clean energy is the future, and ALL energy projects should prioritize private land first to keep wild places wild. When energy extraction is needed on public lands all projects must restore the land after extraction. Public lands are unique and once lost, they’re gone forever.

Sources

Rodriguez-Caballero, E. et al. (2018). “Dryland photoautotrophic soil surface communities endangered by global change.” Nature Geoscience, 11, 185-189.

Rodriguez-Caballero, E. et al. (2022). “Global cycling and climate effects of aeolian dust controlled by biological soil crusts.” Nature Geoscience, 15, 458-463.

Elbert, W. et al. (2012). “Contribution of cryptogamic covers to the global cycles of carbon and nitrogen.” Nature Geoscience, 5, 459-462.

Belnap, J. and Warren, S.D. (2002). “Patton’s tracks in the Mojave Desert, USA: an ecological legacy.” Arid Land Research and Management, 16, 245-258.

Belnap, J. and Eldridge, D.J. (2003). “Disturbance and recovery of biological soil crusts.” In Biological Soil Crusts: Structure, Function, and Management. Springer.

Ferrenberg, S., Reed, S.C. and Belnap, J. (2015). “Climate change and physical disturbance cause similar community shifts in biological soil crusts.” PNAS, 112(39).

U.S. Department of Energy / NREL. (2021). Solar Futures Study. DOE/GO-102021-5608. energy.gov

EPA RE-Powering America’s Land Initiative. Mapper updated June 2022. epa.gov/re-powering

Center for American Progress. (2023). “How States Can Turn Polluted Lands Into Clean Energy.” americanprogress.org

The Wells Nobody Talks About

There are 96,000 oil and gas wells sitting on federal public land right now.

Land that belongs to you. To me. To every American who has never set foot on it and every one who has.

Most people, when they think about public land and the energy industry, picture active drilling rigs, pipelines under construction, political fights over new leases. The debate that gets airtime is always about what gets opened next. What gets permitted next. What gets extracted next.

Nobody talks much about what gets left behind.

I’ve been sitting with a set of federal numbers for a few weeks now. They come from Bureau of Land Management reports, GAO audits, Inspector General findings, and Department of Interior congressional testimony. None of it is hidden. None of it is classified. It just rarely gets assembled into one place where you can see the full shape of it.

So here it is.

The Lease Picture

The federal government currently has about 22 million acres of public land under oil and gas lease. For scale, that’s larger than Maine and Vermont combined. Of those 22 million acres, roughly 12.4 million are actually producing oil and gas in meaningful quantities. That’s about 56 percent.

The other 44 percent, about 9.6 million acres, is leased, locked out of conservation and other public uses, and producing nothing.

Not being drilled. Not being restored. Just held.

The reasons for that are layered and worth their own piece. Low commodity prices make marginal acreage unprofitable to develop. Companies bank leases as assets on their balance sheets. Some is genuinely in the pipeline, working through a permit process that takes months. Some has been sitting idle for years with no apparent intent to develop.

What matters for this story is the consequence. When land is under lease for oil and gas, it cannot be managed for other purposes. Conservation work, habitat restoration, wildlife corridor management, all of that gets pushed aside for acres that aren’t producing anything at all.

That’s the setup. Now here’s where it gets complicated.

The Wells

Of the 96,000-plus oil and gas wells on BLM-managed federal land, about 91,000 sit on producing leases. Some portion of those are what you’d call actively producing. Some are shut-in, meaning a valve is closed and the well is temporarily offline. Could be a pipeline bottleneck. Could be low prices making a marginal well not worth running that month. The operator is still legally responsible. These are recoverable situations.

Then there are temporarily abandoned wells. The operator files paperwork saying they intend to come back. Some do. A lot don’t. Oversight on these is inconsistent at best.

Then there are the 8,500 wells on BLM-managed land classified as idled. That classification means no production in over four years. Not shut-in for a season. Four years of nothing. These are the wells that regulators watch most closely because they represent the clearest path to the last category.

Orphaned wells. No operator. No responsible party. No cleanup plan.

Across all federal lands, which includes BLM, National Forests, National Parks, and Wildlife Refuges, there are roughly 16,000 of them.

That number took about 70 years to build.

How the Math Broke

To drill a well on federal public land, a company was required to post a bond. That bond existed as financial assurance. The idea being that if a company walked away or went bankrupt, the bond would cover the cost of reclaiming the site.

The minimum bond for an individual lease: $10,000.

The average cost to actually clean up a well, per the BLM’s own website: $71,000.

The high end of that cleanup cost: $200,000.

Those bond minimums were set in the 1950s and 1960s. They were not updated for roughly 70 years. Not adjusted for inflation. Not scaled to well depth or complexity. Not revised as hydraulic fracturing created deeper, more complicated wells that cost far more to reclaim.

The GAO flagged this. The Inspector General flagged this. Independent researchers flagged this. The gap was documented, reported, and largely ignored while thousands of more wells were drilled under a bonding structure everyone with any real knowledge of the system understood was inadequate.

The calculation for an operator in financial trouble was not complicated. Plug and reclaim a well properly and spend up to $200,000. Or forfeit a $10,000 bond and walk away.

A lot of them walked.

In June 2024, the bonding minimums were finally updated. Individual lease bonds went from $10,000 to $150,000. Statewide bonds went from $25,000 to $500,000. Nationwide bonds, which previously allowed a single $150,000 bond to cover every well a company owned across the entire country, were eliminated.

That is a meaningful change. It should have happened decades ago.

Here is where it stands today. The new minimums are on the books, but full enforcement is not yet here. Operators with existing bonds below the new minimums can continue operating under the old amounts until June 22, 2027. The Trump administration extended that deadline in late 2025. So the rule exists. The enforcement is still two years out.

The damage from 70 years of inadequate bonding already exists on the ground right now in the form of 16,000 orphaned wells and a liability gap estimated at $6.15 billion.

What $6 Billion Looks Like on the Ground

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocated $250 million to plug orphaned wells on federal lands. That figure sounds significant until you hold it next to the $6.15 billion liability. It covers about four cents on every dollar owed.

In 2023, the federal government plugged 1,500 orphaned wells on public land. At that pace, working through the 16,000 known orphaned wells takes until the mid-2030s. That assumes no new orphaned wells during that period.

New orphaned wells are being created during that period.

What an orphaned well does in the years between abandonment and eventual cleanup is not passive. Methane leaks into the atmosphere continuously. Methane is roughly 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas over a 20-year window. Groundwater gets contaminated. Those contaminants don’t respect lease boundaries. They migrate into aquifers that flow under private ranches, tribal lands, and rural communities downstream. The people most affected are often the ones furthest from any political conversation about federal land management.

The soil around the well site stays disturbed. The habitat stays fragmented. The well pad and access road remain. Pronghorn, sage-grouse, and mule deer depend on connected, intact sagebrush landscapes across the American West. Every well pad and corridor cuts into that connectivity in ways that don’t show up clearly until a population drops and someone starts asking why.

The Part That Should Stop You

There are more than 2,000 inactive oil and gas wells sitting inside at least 47 National Park units.

Most of them involve non-federal mineral ownership. Meaning a private company or individual holds the mineral rights beneath the surface of your national park. The surface is protected. What’s underneath is subject to a different set of rules entirely.

The same situation exists on National Wildlife Refuges. The Fish and Wildlife Service reports 450 orphaned wells on Refuge lands and estimates roughly 2,000 additional wells that are inactive, unplugged, and without identified responsible parties.

Until recently, the entire NPS program responsible for tracking and plugging these wells was run by one person. A petroleum engineer named Forrest Smith, who spent six years building an inventory of abandoned wells inside park units, training inspectors to locate them in the field, and managing a plugging program funded by the Infrastructure Law.

His position was eliminated in 2025.

The wells are still there.

The Broader Argument

There are about 8,500 idled wells on BLM land. There are 16,000 orphaned wells across federal public lands. There is a $6.15 billion cleanup liability with no clear mechanism to collect it from the companies that created it. The land sits disturbed, the methane leaks, the groundwater is at risk, and the habitat stays fragmented.

And the political conversation in Washington is about opening more federal land to drilling.

That is not an argument against domestic energy production. It is a question about basic accountability. About what it means to use land that belongs to the public and what obligation comes with that use.

The federal leasing system was designed, at least in theory, around the idea that extraction could happen and the land could be made whole afterward. Drill, produce, reclaim. That third step has been functionally optional for most of the program’s history. The bonding structure made sure of it.

Fixing the bond minimums in 2024 was the right move. It should have happened decades ago. The backlog that built up in the meantime is now the public’s problem, sitting on the public’s land, funded by the public’s tax dollars.

That’s the story the numbers tell. It doesn’t require much editorial commentary. Just the patience to read them in the same place at the same time.

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Thank you for reading! I highlight threats to public lands and the energy industry’s impact. I believe clean energy is the future, and ALL energy projects should prioritize private land first to keep wild places wild. When energy extraction is needed on public lands all projects must restore the land after extraction. Public lands are unique and once lost, they’re gone forever.

Sources for this piece include:

Bureau of Land Management oil and gas statistics

Department of Interior congressional testimony

Government Accountability Office reports

Inspector General findings

National Park Service program documentation.

We drove in from the west, through the Panamint Valley, the road dropping fast enough that both my wife’s and my ears popped. My daughter was asleep in the backseat. Outside, rust colored rock, layers of it, each band a different era of the earth displaying its indifference to human timelines.

I thought about how hot this place gets in summer. 130 degrees, the kind of heat that warps your understanding of what a planet can do and I felt grateful for February.

As we drove north on Trona Wildrose Road, we passed the stunning Trona Pinnacles entrance. Ancient tufa spires rising from a dry lakebed like something from another planet. Then, almost without warning, the landscape shifted.

A massive industrial site came into view. Searles Valley Minerals has been mining soda ash, borax, and potassium sulfate from this lakebed for over 150 years. A coal-fired power plant sits alongside it, still running.

These kinds of extraction sites leave lasting scars on the land, the air, and the communities nearby. The small town of Trona carries that weight daily.

Progress has a price. And it’s rarely paid by the people who profit from it.

We were headed to Ballarat. A mining ghost town on BLM land. One small whimsical sign marking its importance, describing what’s left of the adobe ruins, how a 1908 car race from Paris to New York passed through, and describing it’s last resident.

Rusted mining equipment still sits where someone abandoned it a hundred years ago, patient as geology, waiting for nothing. We set up our tent nearby, caught a beautiful sunset, and called it home.

The next day we drove into Death Valley to hike. Dante’s View was our trailhead. That’s when the wind found us.

It came across the salt flats in visible sheets. White plumes lifting off Badwater Basin and moving fast, low to the ground, rising against the Black Mountains and disappearing into the rock. It was one of the stranger things I've ever seen. A valley exhaling. What we were watching is a documented process called aeolian transport wind pulling fine salt, gypsum, and mineral particles off the playa and carrying them miles into surrounding ranges.

Scientists have tracked the same phenomenon at planetary scale: Saharan dust crosses the Atlantic and deposits phosphorus into Amazon soils, effectively fertilizing one of the most biodiverse places on earth from one of the most barren. The romance of that is real.

But the science is honest about the other side too. The dust can coat plant leaves, block the pores they breathe through, salinize soil past what anything can tolerate. This is a process these salt flats and mountains have seen for centuries. I wanted to learn more but found no studies about aeolian processes in this area. Ultimately, it’s a natural process and whether we have studied it or not, it's just matter in motion, and what the mountain does with it depends on how much arrives and when.

But that day, the wind was just wind, and my daughter hated it. The wind was from the huge February snow storm front in the Sierra’s. We had her in the backpack carrier and she started crying immediately.

My wife and I looked at each other. Stressed by her tears. Two years ago we would have pushed through. We’re both wired that way: finish the hike, hit the summit, log the miles. There’s a competitiveness to it that we don’t always admit is competitiveness. But something has shifted in us since she was born, some recalibration of what counts as a good day outside, and so we turned around slightly disappointed, but without much discussion and went to look at the Artist’s Drive instead.

The colors there are almost unreasonable. Green from chlorite, purple from manganese, pink from iron oxide. A hillside that looks like someone mixed geological time with a sunset. We walked slowly. The canyons blocked the wind. She was happy. We weren’t keeping score.

That night, back at camp, our daughter was cold. That’s the honest version of the trip. My birthday came and went while I lay awake listening to her breathe in the dark, touching her cheek to check her temperature, doing the math on blanket layers.

There’s a kind of love that feels most like fear, and fatherhood has introduced me to it fully. She did great on her first “test” camp and the next day we retreated to a motel nearby and I felt grateful for a successful night.

But the land. The land stayed with me.

We walked on a sand dune north of Ballarat that held no other footprints. Thirty or so miles east, Death Valley National Park was packed with license plates from multiple states, tour buses, the whole democratic circus of a place people have agreed matters. It had the same sky. Same silence. Same salt lifted by the same wind. The difference was a line on a map and a decision someone made in Washington.

This is the thing about BLM land that people don’t discuss enough: it is yours. Two hundred and forty-five million acres of it, managed by the federal government on behalf of present citizens and the mandate actually says this, future generations. Stewardship across time. Which is a radical concept to sit with in a desert that has already outlasted every human intention brought to it.

What does it mean to hold land in trust for someone not yet born? It means the decisions we make now about extraction, about access, about whether we fund the agencies that manage these places are decisions we’re making on behalf of my daughter, who slept cold in a tent and didn’t know she was inheriting anything. We walked on ground that Timbisha Shoshone people knew for thousands of years before the government drew lines around it. The stewardship question is older than the BLM, older than the country. We arrived at it recently.

I think about the contrast, the packed park, the empty BLM land thirty miles away, and I don’t think the answer is to redirect traffic. These quiet places are partly beautiful because they require something: a little research, some comfort with ambiguity, a willingness to exist somewhere without a visitor center telling you what to feel. But I think about who gets to feel that comfort, and it isn’t everyone. Access is economic. Cultural. Informational. Who taught you these places existed? Who gave you the gear, the long weekend, the confidence that the land was for you?

The wind that lifted salt off the valley floor and carried it up into the Panamint Range didn’t ask who owned the mountains. It just moved, carrying what it could, potentially feeding what was above it.

My daughter is a one year old. She’ll inherit whatever we leave her. She slept under Telescope Peak not knowing any of this. That’s probably fine. That might be the whole point.

Thank you for reading! I highlight threats to public lands and the energy industry’s impact. I believe clean energy is the future, and ALL energy projects should prioritize private land first to keep wild places wild. When energy extraction is needed on public lands all projects must restore the land after extraction. Public lands are unique and once lost, they’re gone forever.

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This Week’s Take

The biggest development this week was Steve Pearce's BLM confirmation hearing, where his defining soundbite"I'm not so sure that I've changed" on selling public lands gave conservation groups exactly the ammunition they feared and hoped for. Meanwhile, Senator Mike Lee launched the first-ever CRA attack on a national monument management plan at Grand Staircase-Escalante, the Cook Inlet offshore lease sale approached with a new legal challenge, and the Senate's expected vote on the Boundary Waters mineral withdrawal appeared to stall without confirmation it occurred. New polling shows the American West isn't buying what Washington is selling. It was a big week. Pay attention.

The State of Public Lands, Energy, and Minerals

1. The Man Who Would Run Your Public Lands Said “I’m Not Sure I’ve Changed”

Steve Pearce, Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that manages 245 million acres of public land, faced two hours of Senate questioning on February 25. When confronted with a 2012 letter he co-signed calling for the sale of federal land and stating “most of it we do not even need,” Pearce replied: “I am not so sure that I’ve changed” then argued that federal law prevents him from conducting large-scale land sales on his own. He also claimed ignorance on major active policy questions, including the Interior Secretary’s directive requiring personal sign-off before any solar or wind project can advance on federal land.

Why this matters: The Bureau of Land Management director controls every lease sale, permit, and monument review across nearly a quarter of America’s land. This nominee walked into his job interview unable to disavow selling it.

2. Grand Staircase-Escalante Faces an Unprecedented Legal Assault

Senator Mike Lee of Utah used the Congressional Review Act this week to target Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument’s management plan, the first time in United States history this legislative tool has been aimed at a national monument. The Congressional Review Act allows Congress to nullify federal rules or plans with a simple majority vote, and if this resolution passes, the Bureau of Land Management would be permanently barred from issuing a substantially similar plan potentially opening roughly 700,000 acres to coal mining and oil and gas leasing. Six tribal nations and a majority of Utah voters, including most Republicans, oppose the move.

Why this matters: The Congressional Review Act is a one-way door. Once used to kill a management plan, no future administration can bring back anything substantially similar this isn’t a pause, it’s a permanent lock.

3. The Boundary Waters Vote: Expected, But Still Unconfirmed

Congress was widely expected this week to vote on a resolution to cancel the 20-year mineral withdrawal protecting roughly 225,000 acres of Superior National Forest next to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota from copper-nickel sulfide mining. The resolution needs only a simple 51-vote Senate majority, no extended debate required, and hundreds of Minnesotans rallied at the State Capitol on February 25 as the vote loomed. As of March 3, no confirmed Senate action had occurred. This vote could arrive with very little notice.

Why this matters: If this resolution passes and is signed, the mineral protection is canceled permanently and no future administration can reinstate it clearing the way for copper-nickel sulfide mining upstream from over a million acres of clean water wilderness. That type of mining has never been done anywhere in the world without polluting nearby water.

4. The Arctic Is Going Up for Auction. A New Legal Fight Is Here.

The Bureau of Land Management is accepting bids through March 16 on a massive oil and gas lease sale in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. Roughly 5.5 million acres the size of New Jersey, including some of the most ecologically sensitive habitat in the entire Arctic. The sale is the first of five mandated by last year’s federal budget law, but conservation groups argue it is far more destructive than what the law actually requires, since the Interior Department had authority to protect the most sensitive areas and chose not to use it. Lawsuits from Earthjustice and The Wilderness Society are active in federal court, and a new legal challenge filed February 26 alleges the government failed to evaluate impacts to Arctic wildlife before proceeding.

Why this matters: The National Petroleum Reserve is the largest piece of undisturbed public land in the United States. Once it is leased and developed, the word undisturbed is gone. Permanently.

5. More Acres. More Sales. More Deadlines Passing Quietly.

The Bureau of Land Management announced a new oil and gas lease sale for April 28 offering 23 parcels totaling 8,993 acres in North and South Dakota, with public comment open through March 23. Public protest windows for the March 31 lease sales in Colorado (52,703 acres), Utah (68,632 acres), and Nevada (19,957 acres) all closed March 2 and separate comment periods on an additional 160,628 acres in Colorado close March 13, and another 20,600 acres in Nevada close March 11. These sales happen on a schedule, and the clock runs whether anyone is watching or not.

Why this matters: Every acre leased is locked into fossil fuel development for decades. Public comment windows are often the last tool citizens have to push back miss the window, and the decision is already made.

Next step, vote in November.

6. The People Paid to Protect Public Lands Are Disappearing

No major new layoffs hit federal land management agencies this week, but the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s independent watchdog, released a report on February 24 documenting roughly 134,000 federal employee separations in just the first half of 2025, with an additional 144,000 departing through the administration’s voluntary resignation program by year’s end. The National Parks Conservation Association separately documented a 24% decline in the National Park Service’s permanent workforce since January 2025. The Forest Service opened a rare 10-day hiring window this week for roughly 2,000 seasonal workers its first significant hiring since the mass firings of February 2025.

Why this matters: Land doesn’t manage itself. Outdoor recreation contributes $1.1 trillion annually to the United States economy and supports 5 million jobs and every ranger station that closes and every trail that goes unmaintained is a cost that falls directly on the communities built around these places.

Energy News

7. The Government Is Betting $171 Million on Geothermal. Both Parties Are On Board.

On February 25, the Department of Energy announced $171.5 million in funding for next-generation geothermal energy, the largest single federal investment in the sector’s history. The money targets enhanced geothermal systems, or EGS, a technology that uses the same deep drilling and rock-fracturing techniques developed by the oil and gas industry to tap into the Earth’s heat virtually anywhere (not just near volcanoes or hot springs). The Department of Energy’s own analysis estimates the U.S. has the potential for at least 300 gigawatts of reliable geothermal power on the grid by 2050 that’s 75 times current capacity. Because the technology uses familiar oil-and-gas equipment and employs similar workers, it’s one of the few clean energy sources with genuine bipartisan backing and the Trump administration has kept its tax credits intact while stripping them from wind and solar.

Why this matters for public lands: Enhanced geothermal can be developed on already-disturbed land and existing drilling infrastructure keeping the case for wild land sacrifice much harder to make. This is the kind of energy development worth watching closely.

8. Clean Energy Is Growing Whether Washington Wants It To or Not.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration,Co ngress’s independent energy data agency, projects that American power plant developers plan to add 86 gigawatts of new generating capacity to the grid in 2026, with solar accounting for 51%, battery storage 28%, and wind 14%. Natural gas comes in at just 7%. During the Trump administration’s first year, renewable energy capacity grew by roughly 55,800 megawatts, while fossil fuels and nuclear combined added fewer than 800. The policy headwinds are real wind subsidies are being phased out, offshore wind is frozen, and solar tax credits face uncertainty. The market apparently didn’t get the memo.

Why this matters: The energy transition isn’t waiting for permission. The question now is whether the infrastructure (transmission lines, grid upgrades, permitting) can keep up with the build-out, or whether bottlenecks hand fossil fuels a second life they haven’t earned.

Other Stories Worth Flagging

Former top land managers from both parties call for a rethink. Biden-era Bureau of Land Management Director Tracy Stone-Manning and George W. Bush-era Deputy Interior Secretary Lynn Scarlett co-authored a piece in High Country News this week calling for a bipartisan overhaul of how the federal government manages public land. Arguing the laws governing these lands were written for a different century and need to catch up with climate change, mass recreation, and the energy transition.

Fifteen Democratic-led states walked away from their Arctic Refuge lawsuit. Washington State and 14 others filed notice on February 11 abandoning a six-year-old lawsuit challenging oil and gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, citing new congressional and administration actions that require a different legal strategy. They indicated they are evaluating support for Alaska Native organizations’ litigation instead.

Senator Lee is coming back for more. Senator Mike Lee of Utah has announced plans to reintroduce a public lands sell-off amendment to the federal budget reconciliation package, the same type of proposal his own Republican colleagues killed last fall under constituent pressure.

The Wilderness Society is suing for transparency. A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeks records from a joint Interior-Housing and Urban Development task force formed in March 2025 that was reportedly targeting public lands for private sale and development. The Bureau of Land Management claimed it had “no responsive records” despite publicly acknowledging its role in the task force.

A highway through a national conservation area is being challenged in court. Six conservation groups sued in early February to block the Northern Corridor Highway project. A road approved by the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to cut through Red Cliffs National Conservation Area in Utah, home to the threatened Mojave desert tortoise. The lawsuit alleges violations of both the Endangered Species Act and federal environmental review requirements.

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Thank you for reading! I highlight threats to public lands and the energy industry’s impact. I believe clean energy is the future, and ALL energy projects should prioritize private land first to keep wild places wild. When energy extraction is needed on public lands all projects must restore the land after extraction. Public lands are unique and once lost, they’re gone forever.

Sources:

Colorado Public Radio

Inside Climate News

Courthouse News Service

Earthjustice

Bureau of Land Management - Press Release

High Country News

Big Beautiful Cook Inlet (BBC1) Oil and Gas Lease Sale

BLM - BLM announces March 2026 sale of oil and gas leases in Nevada

BLM - BLM, USDA Forest Service announce 2026 grazing fees

GOA

Electrek

Department of Energy

WAMC

This Week’s Take

The throughline this week is simple and loud: big extraction is racing to lock in space on public land before the public fully wakes up. From a five-and-a-half-million-acre Arctic lease sale to new mining fights in Nevada and along the Minnesota–Canada border, oil, gas, and “critical minerals” are all pressing on the same finite map. The good news: tribes, local communities, and a very tired but stubborn public are meeting them in court, in comment portals, and in the halls of Congress. Voting in the November elections will be critically important.

The State of Public Lands, Energy, and Minerals

February 17 — Massive Arctic lease sale faces new legal fire

Conservation groups and an Iñupiat organization sued to stop a March 18 oil and gas lease sale that would open about 5.5 million acres in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, including tracts near Teshekpuk Lake and the Colville River that were long treated as special protection areas.

Why it matters: This is one of the biggest single public-lands oil offerings in years, and it targets wetlands, caribou habitat, and subsistence hunting areas at the exact moment the United States claims it wants to cut climate pollution; if it goes forward, it locks in new Arctic fossil infrastructure on public land for decades.

February 20 — Interior opens 2.1 million acres in Alaska’s Dalton Corridor to mining and other claims

The Department of the Interior, led by Doug Burgum, issued Public Land Order 7966, lifting long-standing protections and opening about 2.1 million acres along the Dalton Highway utility corridor to entry under mining and other public-land laws, framed as fulfilling Alaska’s statehood land promises and enabling “major energy projects.”

Why it matters: This is a huge shift in who controls a critical strip of tundra that already carries the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and roads; it makes it much easier to stake new mineral claims and build energy infrastructure in caribou and subsistence country, trading federal planning and public input for faster extraction on land that had been effectively off-limits for decades.

February 9–11 — Boundary Waters mining protections hang on a knife’s edge

After the House voted in January to overturn a 20-year ban on sulfide-ore mining in the watershed of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, advocates warned this week that the Senate could soon take up the same resolution under the Congressional Review Act, even as the vote has now been delayed and hunters, anglers, and paddlers are flooding senators with calls.

Why it matters: This is about whether a law can permanently reopen the door to copper-nickel mining just upstream of one of the cleanest lake and river systems in North America; if this rollback succeeds, it becomes a blueprint to strip long-term mineral withdrawals from other public-land watersheds.

February 18 — Congress eyes monument plans as a new tool for undoing protections

New analysis and advocacy this week highlighted that members of Congress are now using the Congressional Review Act—the same repeal tool threatening Boundary Waters’ mining moratorium—to go after public-land management plans, starting with the resource management plan for Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument and potentially others like California’s Carrizo Plain.

Why it matters: These plans are the master blueprints that say where drilling, mining, and transmission lines can and cannot go; if Congress starts wiping them out with simple majority votes, it erases years of local input and leaves communities fighting bad projects one by one on a tilted field. Check out post on how this administration is inappropriately using this obscure law.

The People in Charge

February 18 — Park veterans say the new National Park Service nominee is built for concessions, not conservation

The Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks blasted President Trump’s choice of Scott Socha, a senior executive at hospitality giant Delaware North to lead the National Park Service, citing his lack of land-management experience and deep financial ties to park concession contracts worth billions.

Why it matters: Putting the country’s top concessionaire in charge of the park system blurs the line between steward and vendor; it tilts decisions about access, development, and even conservation funding toward industrial tourism and revenue, not quiet habitat or backcountry protections.

“The Director shall have substantial experience and demonstrated competence in land management and natural or cultural resource conservation.” - (US Code) CHAPTER 1003 - ESTABLISHMENT, DIRECTORS, AND OTHER EMPLOYEES

More Than Just Parks

We Built Something to Stop Sellout Scott. Here’s How to Use It.

Last week I published what I believe is the most comprehensive investigation into Scott Socha’s nomination to run the National Park Service. If you haven’t read it yet, start there…

Read more

5 months ago · 124 likes · 29 comments · Will Pattiz

February 19 — Energy Secretary threatens to pull the U.S. out of the International Energy Agency over climate planning

At a ministerial meeting in Paris, Chris Wright gave the International Energy Agency one year to drop its net-zero-by-2050 scenarios from flagship reports, warning that otherwise the United States may quit the agency altogether, while calling net-zero goals a “destructive illusion.”

Why it matters: The International Energy Agency’s models are the yardstick many governments and companies use to plan clean energy build-out; if the U.S. forces that yardstick back toward fossil-heavy futures, it undercuts the case for rapid renewables, efficiency, and transmission even as public-lands drilling and export projects ramp up.

February 20 — Alaska’s governor cheers Dalton Corridor opening as a win for “unleashing” state resources

Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy publicly praised Interior’s Dalton Corridor order as a “milestone” that will help the state secure long-promised lands and “develop its resources,” tying the move directly to the administration’s “Unleashing American Energy” agenda.

Why it matters: State leaders are signaling they plan to lean hard into new selection and development of these federal acres; for conservation and community groups, that means the real fights are coming next over which parcels move out of federal hands, what gets mined or drilled first, and how subsistence and wildlife factor into those choices.

November 19 - A big job at Yosemite shows a different kind of leadership choice

Something I missed that is a glimmer of hope.

About three months ago, the park service quietly made Ray McPadden an agency veteran and former Army ranger the new superintendent of Yosemite National Park after a stint as acting superintendent, citing his experience managing visitor use, wildfire risk, and conflicts over protest banners on cliffs like El Capitan.

Why it matters: At one of the crown-jewel parks, the agency still picked a career public-lands manager over a corporate outsider, a reminder that not every leadership slot is moving toward privatization and that resistance to those trends is still coming from inside the system as well as outside.

Thank you for reading! I highlight threats to public lands and the energy industry’s impact. I believe clean energy is the future, and ALL energy projects should prioritize private land first to keep wild places wild. When energy extraction is needed on public lands all projects must restore the land after extraction. Public lands are unique and once lost, they’re gone forever.

Sources:

Department of the Interior - Department of the Interior Opens 2.1 Million Acres in Alaska’s Dalton Corridor

Pahrump Valley Times - ‘Too special to drill’: Tribe, environmentalists sue over mine near Ash Meadows

GOA.gov - U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management― Applicability of the Congressional Review Act to the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Record of Decision and Approved Resource Management Plan

AP News - House Republicans vote to lift 20-year ban on mining near pristine Boundary Waters Canoe Area

Alaska Beacon - A major new Arctic oil field prompted a deal to protect caribou. Then Trump officials backed out.

The Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks - National Park Service Director Must Champion Parks

AP NEws - Lawsuits challenge renewed push for oil drilling in Alaska petroleum reserve and upcoming lease sale

Reuters - US Energy Secretary Pressures to Quit Net Zero Agenda

Alaska Office of Governor Mike Dunleavy - Governor Dunleavy Welcomes Interior Department Actions Opening 2.1 Million Acres in Dalton Corridor

SF Chronicle - Yosemite National Park Names New Superintendent

This Week’s Take

Artificial intelligence and industrial buildouts are now land-use decisions in disguise. The United States is racing to feed data centers and factories with new power while the federal government both turbocharges drilling on wild Arctic ground and quietly slows wind and solar on public lands. This week’s stories sit on that fault line: an enormous Arctic lease sale, a renewable “blockade,” a sacred-site controversy, and one of the biggest corporate solar deals ever signed. The question underneath all of it: do we meet this new demand on already-scarred ground, or carve up more of the last quiet places?

The State of Public Lands and Energy Relationship

February 5 — Federal government revives massive drilling sale in Arctic oil reserve

The Trump administration announced that the Bureau of Land Management will auction oil and gas leases across five and a half million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska on March 9, the first sale there since 2019 and one of at least five required by Congress under the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” Within days, officials quietly delayed the sale after a public notice error but kept the full footprint on the table.

Why it matters: This resets the default toward more drilling in a vast Arctic landscape that includes caribou habitat, wetlands around Teshekpuk Lake and other subsistence areas, locking in new fossil infrastructure on public land right as demand for cleaner power is exploding.

February 8 — California public lands targeted for expanded drilling under “energy security” banner

New reporting and analysis detailed how the administration has moved to open more than one million acres of public land in California including nearly four hundred thousand acres overlapping parks, beaches, and ecological reserves to new oil and gas leasing, framed as a push for energy security even as production grows elsewhere.

Why it matters: Pointing the drill bit at heavily used recreation and habitat corridors makes extraction the default use of some of the most visible public landscapes, rather than steering new energy build toward brownfields, existing fields, and other disturbed sites.

February 5 — Federal “blockade” slows dozens of wind and solar projects on public lands

Synthesis pieces this week pulled together agency data and records showing that President Donald Trump’s team has stalled or frozen more than sixty large wind and solar projects on public lands, and hundreds more on private land, through permitting pauses, rule rewrites, and staffing cuts, even as new oil and gas leases race ahead.

Why it matters: It undercuts the idea that this is an “all of the above” energy strategy and shows public land policy actively tilting the playing field toward fossil projects with long-term climate and land-use impacts while clean projects sit in limbo.

February 3 — Federal regulators approve a two-billion-dollar renewable project on Yakama sacred ground

The Washington State Standard reported that federal regulators green-lit a roughly two-billion-dollar renewable energy project on or near land that the Yakama Nation considers sacred, despite tribal concerns about cultural resources and treaty rights.

Why it matters: This is the clean-energy mirror of the Arctic drilling fight: even low-carbon projects can do real damage if they are pushed onto sacred or intact ground instead of built first on already-disturbed sites, and tribes are again being asked to carry the cost of everyone else’s power.

Government Spotlight Public Lands

February 10 — New rules muzzle what park rangers can say about climate and protest

An internal memo, sparked by Executive Order 14253, laid out sweeping new communications rules for the National Park Service, barring staff from using phrases like “climate crisis,” tightening references to environmental justice and protest, and directing some parks to scrub websites and signs that discuss climate change or racial history.

Why it matters: What rangers say at trailheads shapes how visitors see public lands; if climate, colonization, or protest are treated as off-limits, parks risk becoming pretty backdrops rather than places that spark stewardship and honest debate about what happens on the surrounding landscape. So much for free speech!

February 10 — House panel weighs bills that would chip away at federal land protections

The House Natural Resources Committee’s Federal Lands panel scheduled a legislative hearing on a bundle of bills, including proposals to adjust access around Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument, convey Bureau of Land Management parcels to local governments, and alter how post-fire national forest lands are managed.

Why it matters: Each bill is small on its own, but together they keep moving the line on what counts as “disposable” federal land, shifting chunks of the shared estate into local or private hands and rewriting the rules on how forests and monuments bounce back after fires.

February 9 — Trump reopens a deep-sea national monument to industrial fishing

Ocean policy watchers reported that a new presidential proclamation reopens the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument to commercial fishing, unwinding prior protections that had limited industrial harvest in a rare deep-sea canyon and seamount complex off New England.

Why it matters: Even small offshore monuments are key climate and biodiversity refuges. Rolling back protections signals that any protected status from desert to canyon to coral reef can be reversed when politics or industry pressure heat up.

February 10 — A bird gets its graduation diploma

The United States Fish and Wildlife Service finalized a rule removing the wood stork (Southeast United States population) from Endangered Species Act protections after recovery.

Why it matters: Delisting can be a conservation win and a management stress test. It shifts the burden from federal emergency protections to long-term habitat stewardship, often in fast-growing regions where water, wetlands, and development pressures collide.

Clean Energy in the News

February 9 — Google locks in one gigawatt of Texas solar to feed artificial intelligence data centers

French energy company TotalEnergies signed two fifteen-year contracts to build and operate one gigawatt of new solar projects in Texas that will deliver about twenty-eight terawatt hours of power to Google’s growing data centers, with construction on the Wichita and Mustang Creek sites due to start this spring.

Why it matters: It is one of the largest corporate solar deals ever in the United States, proof that data center growth can bankroll huge clean energy projects while also accelerating the scramble for flat, sunny land and new transmission in already crowded energy landscapes.

February 2 — Offshore wind keeps breathing (for now)

A federal judge rejected an effort to halt construction on the Revolution Wind offshore wind project after the administration paused offshore wind permits.

Why it matters: Every stop-start cycle increases cost and pushes developers toward “least resistance” siting which is not always the “least impact” siting. Stable rules are how you keep clean energy on the disturbance-first path instead of the frantic-anywhere path.

February 4 — Transmission policy is the land-use policy (even when it pretends not to be)

A coalition of state attorneys general filed in support of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission transmission planning and cost allocation rule, arguing it is needed to build and pay for long-distance lines.

Why it matters: Transmission decides where generation goes. Get planning right and we can lean on existing corridors and brownfields more often; get it wrong and we sprawl new lines (and new fights) across habitat, viewsheds, and cultural landscapes

Thank you for reading! I highlight threats to public lands and the energy industry’s impact. I believe clean energy is the future, and ALL energy projects should prioritize private land first to keep wild places wild. When energy extraction is needed on public lands all projects must restore the land after extraction. Public lands are unique and once lost, they’re gone forever.

Sources:

Reuters - Rising US industrial load intensifies power generation need

Washington State Standard - Feds greenlight $2B renewable energy project on Yakama Nation sacred site

Reuters - TotalEnergies to provide solar power to Google’s Texas data centres

National Resource Committee - Legislative Hearing: Federal Lands | February 10th

Ocean Policy Insights from ESP Advisors - Appropriations Season Never Ends: FY26 Unfinished, FY27 Begins

SFGate - ‘Unprecedented and a mess’: Sweeping new rules restrict nearly all aspects of national park communications

Center for Western Priorities - Trump is delaying renewable projects on public and private land

Bureau of Ocean Energy Management - California Oil and Gas Leasing Activities

Reuters - US to auction drilling rights for Alaska reserve on March 9

US Fish and Wildlife - Wood Stork Delisted

Federal Register.gov - Call for Nominations and Comments for the 2026 Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Lease Sale

Environmental and Energy Law Program Harvard Law School - Federal Offshore Wind Deployment

Center for Biological Diversity - Federal Government Announces New Analysis of Nevada Transmission Line

The grid does a very human thing. It’s cautious. It operates like today is always the worst day: peak heat, no breeze, everyone cooking dinner at once. That caution keeps the lights on. It also leaves a lot of capacity and clean energy on the table.

Essentially, wasted energy.

Lets start with the plain physics. In the U.S., about 5% of electricity is lost in transmission and distribution on average. It turns into heat on the way to you. That’s not scandal. It’s a reminder that the wires are not free.

Then there’s the more painful waste: clean power we already built but can’t use. In 2024, the California grid operator curtailed 3.4 million megawatt-hours of utility-scale wind and solar, and solar was 93% of what got shut off. That’s not “solar failed.” That’s “the system couldn’t absorb or move it when it showed up.”

Side note: That stat seemed crazy to me. Let’s push for more solar + battery solutions as well.

Then there’s the money bonfire: congestion. When cheaper power can’t get through a constrained path, the grid buys more expensive power closer to load. A Grid Strategies report found nationwide congestion costs have stayed above $10 billion for years and surpassed $12 billion in 2024.

So the problem isn’t just building clean energy. It’s delivering it. And that’s where Grid-Enhancing Technologies (GETs) quietly change the story.

Here’s what’s new: GETs treat the grid less like plumbing and more like logistics. They don’t require a new corridor across a ridgeline. They upgrade how we run the corridors we already have.

First is Dynamic Line Ratings. Today, many transmission lines are limited by “static” ratings based on conservative assumptions rather than real-time conditions. Dynamic ratings use up-to-date weather and operating data to calculate what a line can safely carry right now, instead of what it might carry on a brutal day. FERC’s own explainer is blunt about the point: fixed ratings can underutilize transmission; dynamic ratings help use it more efficiently.

Second is power-flow control. Electricity follows physics, not your preferred route. On a stressed system, one corridor can choke while another has breathing room. Power-flow devices act like steering. Nudging electricity away from the bottleneck so the network shares the load.

Third is topology optimization. Same wires, new play calls. Operators change which lines are in service (within reliability rules) to re-route flow and relieve constraints. It’s the grid learning to use its own map better.

None of this is a silver bullet. It won’t replace the need for new transmission forever. But it can be fast, and it can be big, because you’re improving existing infrastructure rather than starting a fresh fight over new right-of-way.

And that’s the conservation payoff. Every new transmission corridor is a land story: clearing, roads, access routes, fragmentation. Sometimes those tradeoffs are worth it. Sometimes they’re avoidable. GETs are the rare lever that can reduce pressure for “build it anywhere, quickly” decisions by extracting more capacity from the lines we already have. Less panic planning. Fewer rushed scars.

However they are some blockers.

Incentives + cost recovery: GETs save the system money, but nobody wants to be the one holding the bill, so “smart operations” keeps losing to shiny, rate-based steel in the budget line.

Reliability + operator conservatism: GETs ask grid operators to trust live data instead of worst-case rules, and when the penalty for being wrong is an outage, caution wins by default.

The win is not that GETs make the grid perfect. The win is that they make it less wasteful. Less congested. Less prone to turning clean energy into a rounding error. When the grid runs closer to its true capability, we can be choosier about where the big stuff goes. And being choosy is how you protect places.

If you want me to do deeper dives into these technologies please comment. Thanks!

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Thank you for reading! I highlight threats to public lands and the energy industry’s impact. I believe clean energy is the future, and ALL energy projects should prioritize private land first to keep wild places wild. When energy extraction is needed on public lands all projects must restore the land after extraction. Public lands are unique and once lost, they’re gone forever.

Sources:

FERC - Explainer on the Implementation of Dynamic Line Ratings

Grid Strategies - Transmission Congestion For 2024

US Energy Information Administration - How much electricity is lost in electricity transmission and distribution in the United States?

US Energy Information Administration - Solar and wind power curtailments are increasing in California

This Week’s Take

This week felt like somebody put America’s wild places on a lazy Susan and started spinning. The Boundary Waters got shoved toward the edge. BLM kept the leasing machine warm with new parcel lists. And a federal appeals board basically said: not so fast, you still have to follow the law. Meanwhile, clean energy kept doing what it should do. More power, less sprawl, fewer fresh scars if we’re smart about it.

The State of Public Lands and Energy Relationship

January 21 - Boundary Waters mineral protections targeted (H.J.Res. 140 passes House)

The House passed a resolution aimed at overturning the Boundary Waters-area mineral withdrawal (Public Land Order 7917), teeing up a faster path for copper-nickel mining pressure near the wilderness.

Why this matters: This isn’t just one mine fight, it’s whether long-term watershed protection can be undone on a political shortcut, right when we’re supposed to be getting more serious about “don’t poison the water.”

January 24–26 - Grand Staircase–Escalante gets the “Boundary Waters treatment” (CRA threat).

A new GAO (U.S. Government Accountability Office) decision says the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument Record of Decision + Resource Management Plan qualifies as a “rule” under the Congressional Review Act, which opens the door for Congress to try to overturn it.

Why this matters: This is bigger than one monument. If CRA becomes the go-to weapon for land-use plans, years of public process can get erased with a short vote, and monument protections start to look… temporary.

January 21 - Wyoming lease-sale scoping opens: 271 parcels, 357,358 acres

BLM opened a 30-day scoping window for a potential September 2026 Wyoming oil-and-gas lease sale, with a preliminary list totaling 357,358 acres.

Why this matters: Scoping is where the map quietly hardens—once parcels make it through this funnel, the “where” question gets harder to claw back. This is the moment for disturbance-first and real stipulations, not vibes

Jan 22, 2026 — Interior appeals board vacates approval of massive Wyoming gas project (NPL)

An Interior Board of Land Appeals decision vacated BLM’s approval for Jonah Energy’s Normally Pressured Lance Project after Clean Air Act conformity issues, per reporting this week.

Why this matters: This is what “rule of law” looks like on public land, if agencies cut corners, projects can get knocked back years later… after the pressure (and drilling) momentum is already rolling.

January 26 - The U.S. government is literally buying into mining companies (shares + warrants).

Commerce Department is backing a $1.6B debt-and-equity package for USA Rare Earth, including the U.S. receiving shares and warrants (an equity stake) as part of the deal. In this case (USA Rare Earth) mines are not on public land, but earlier this year they purchased shares of Trilogy Metals (Ambler, Alaska) and Lithium Americas (Thacker Pass) which are on public lands complicating the securities vs conservation priority.

Why this matters: When the government becomes a shareholder, it changes the vibe. Faster dealmaking, more “national security” framing, and a higher chance we treat landscapes like supply-chain components.

Government Spotlight Public Lands

January 21 - BLM approves Northern Corridor highway plan through a National Conservation Area

BLM approved construction of Washington County’s Northern Corridor highway, a long-debated right-of-way cutting through public land in southern Utah.

Why this matters: Roads are forever. One “transportation fix” can become decades of habitat slicing, edge effects, invasives, and the slow-motion unraveling of what a protected landscape is supposed to mean.

January 22 - FERC greenlights fast-track interconnection studies (MISO + SPP)

FERC accepted expedited interconnection-study processes intended to move resources through the queue faster in MISO and SPP.

Why this matters: Permitting fights get loud, but queues are where projects go to die quietly. Faster, smarter interconnection can mean fewer “new stuff everywhere” arguments because we’re actually using the grid we already have.

Clean Energy in the News

January 22 - DOE puts $155M into industrial efficiency + load flexibility (including data-center cooling)

Department of Energy’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation selected 16 projects to strengthen national-lab capabilities for industrial efficiency, process heating, load flexibility, and even a data center cooling collaborative.

Why this matters: Every megawatt you don’t waste is a megawatt you don’t have to generate, which can mean fewer new corridors, pads, and land fights. Efficiency is conservation’s quiet ally.

I have a piece coming out on the top 3 technologies (Grid Enhancing Technologies (GETs): More Megawatts, Same Wires, Less Land) that I believe can make an impact. It comes out on January 31st.

January 22 - FERC issues a 50-year license for a 1,200-MW pumped-storage project (Goldendale, WA)

FERC licensed the Goldendale Energy Storage Project, a major pumped-storage facility designed to store energy at grid scale.

Why this matters: If we want clean power without carpeting fresh terrain in new generation, storage is the cheat code—shift energy in time, reduce peaker demand, and ease pressure to industrialize new places.

Thank you for reading! I highlight threats to public lands and the energy industry’s impact. I believe clean energy is the future, and ALL energy projects should prioritize private land first to keep wild places wild. When energy extraction is needed on public lands all projects must restore the land after extraction. Public lands are unique and once lost, they’re gone forever.

Sources:

FERC - Energized for 2026

ColoradoPubli Radio - The US Wildland Fire Service has officially launched. Congress decided not to fund it

DOE - U.S. Department of Energy Awards $2.7 Billion to Restore American Uranium Enrichment

DOI - Interior to Launch U.S. Wildland Fire Service

Politico Pro - House deploys rule-killing law against Biden mining curbs

The Colorado Sun - Oil and gas companies leave nearly half of leases on Colorado public lands unsold at federal auctions

BLM - BLM oil and gas lease sales in Montana and North Dakota generate over $8.6 million in revenue

Reuters - US to back $1.6 billion USA Rare Earth funding, shares jump

Open for Comment Now

1) Bureau of Land Management oil & gas lease sale — Wyoming (2026 second quarter)

What’s happening: Public comment is open for the environmental assessment / finding of no significant impact materials for the 2026 second-quarter competitive oil & gas lease sale (current parcel count + acreage listed on the project page).

Deadline: Tonight — Jan 22, 2026 (10:59 pm PT / 11:59 pm MT)

How to take action: Comment via the “Participate Now” link on the project page.

Link to Participate: BLM Project Home

2) Bureau of Land Management draft supplemental environmental impact statement — Bakersfield Field Office (California)

What’s happening: Draft supplemental environmental impact statement for oil & gas leasing and development (Bakersfield planning area).

Deadline: March 6, 2026

Public meeting: February 3, 2026

How to take action: Comment via the “Participate Now” link on the project page.

Link to Participate: BLM Project Home

3) Bureau of Land Management draft supplemental environmental impact statement — Central Coast Field Office (California)

What’s happening: Draft supplemental environmental impact statement for oil & gas leasing and development (Central Coast planning area).

Deadline: March 6, 2026

Public meeting: January 29, 2026

How to take action: Comment via the “Participate Now” link on the project page.

Link to Participate: BLM Project Home

4) Soda Mountain Solar Project — California Energy Commission (opt-in certification under Assembly Bill 205)

What’s happening: Draft environmental impact report materials are out for public review (as part of the staff assessment).

Deadline: February 27, 2026 — 5:00 pm PT

How to take action: Submit comments through the project docket (linked in the notice).

Link to Participate: Submit an E-Comment

5) Colorado River: Post-2026 Reservoir Operations — Draft environmental impact statement

What’s happening: Big, long-horizon decision for Lake Powell + Lake Mead operations (and the power/water dominoes downstream).

Deadline: March 2, 2026

Public meetings: Jan 29, 2026 + Feb 10, 2026 (virtual)

How to take action: Email a comment (address listed on the page) and/or show up to one meeting.

Link to Participate: Attend in Person/Virtual or email comments to: crbpost2026@usbr.gov | Colorado River Post 2026 Operations

6) Hells Canyon Hydroelectric Project (Idaho/Oregon) — Federal Energy Regulatory Commission draft supplemental environmental impact statement

What’s happening: Draft supplemental environmental impact statement is out.
Deadline: March 2, 2026 @ 2:00 pm PT (5:00 pm ET)

How to take action: Comment through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission docket process (instructions in the release).

Link to Participate: Project Site (no comment link available)

Recent leases coming online

These are leases (the first step), not drilling approvals, but they’re the pipeline filling up.

• Jan 6, 2026 — New Mexico + Oklahoma: 31 parcels (20,399 acres) leased for $326.8 million in total receipts.

• Jan 13, 2026 — Montana + North Dakota: 19 parcels (4,116 acres) leased for $8.653 million in total receipts.

• Dec 17, 2025 — Utah: Bureau of Land Management reported an oil & gas lease sale generating nearly $65 million.

Watchlist (auction dates):

• Wyoming — March 3, 2026: scheduled sale (parcel + acreage totals listed in the announcement).

• Eastern States — March 12, 2026: scheduled sale (eight parcels listed).

Public land sales / disposals

• Washington County, Utah (Red Cliffs / Warner Valley land exchange): 929 acres Bureau of Land Management conveyed public acres as part of an exchange (tradeoffs matter, track the terms).